COTTAGE GROVE — A man who helped bring Canada geese back from the brink of extinction is now trying to tame their population.

Tom Keefe spent the late 1970s on a North Dakota farm, working with a captive flock as part of breeding and transplanting efforts that were a huge success — too huge for some communities. More than three decades later, Keefe’s job is to round them up and ship them off to be killed.

“It’s not a pleasure,” he said of the role reversal. “It’s like, do you have any idea how much work it was to get this many?”

His company, Cottage Grove-based Canada Goose Management Inc., services parks, golf courses and other locales that have become havens for too many geese.

On a busy day, Keefe’s crew might trap more than 100 birds. From there, it’s off to a poultry plant for slaughter and processing. The adult geese wind up at food shelves for the needy; the goslings become wolf food.

The Twin Cities metro area is an ideal summer home for geese, said Steve Cordts, a waterfowl specialist with the Department of Natural Resources. There are plenty of shallow bodies of water, an abundant supply of grass, safe spots to nest and few natural predators.

The population in Greater Minnesota tallies well above the DNR’s goal of 250,000, he said. In some years, it peaks above 400,000, despite the hundreds of thousands of birds shot by hunters annually. The metro-area population comes in around 17,000. That’s still enough to create a nuisance — and sometimes a threat to water quality — on golf courses and popular beaches.

The DNR used to ship surplus geese to other states. By 1996, no one would take them, so the state started processing the birds for food shelves. A decade later, no one would take goslings, either, so animal researchers started using dead goslings to feed captive wolves.

When the DNR stepped away from the goose-management business, Keefe’s company stepped in.

Keefe said he sympathizes with critics of geese removal. He still has fond memories of working on restoration and having goslings follow him around. He said he’s more troubled by people who urge him to “get rid of those dirty birds” than by people who don’t like removal at all.

“I love geese. I think they’re the coolest thing ever,” he said.

But, he conceded, “Sometimes, they make a mess.”