OCT. 22, 2006 The Canada geese that honk and chew their lives away on the golden ponds of suburbia aren't really all that much of a problem.

It's what they leave behind that drives golf pros, pond owners and office park superintendents crazy - up to four pounds of droppings per bird per day.

That's why earlier this year, Sayler Park resident and serial entrepreneur Thomas R. Wells came up with Away With Geese.

"I used to work trade shows for a company I owned and those flashing yellow lights on some booths drove me crazy," Wells said. "You'd try to look away but by the end of the show, you'd have a terrible headache."

That's when Wells' personal light bulb went off. Would a flashing yellow beacon do the same thing to geese? Drive them crazy? Drive them away?

While others smelled goose refuse, Wells sniffed something else: getting rid of geese and their green droppings might bring him a pile of greenbacks.

After a couple nights in a lawn chair watching geese go sleepy-bye (they scramble into lakes and ponds at night to avoid predators and then promptly fall asleep) and some trial and error, Wells developed a simple contraption that users say works better than any approach they've seen.

Chemical treatments at $270 a gallon are expensive and only last two weeks - less if it rains. Dogs work only as long as the dog isn't afraid to get wet. Sometimes the geese fly off, wait for the dog to go away and then return.

Wells' patent-protected Away With Geese works, users say. A floating, solar-powered LED light that is anchored in a bay of a big pond or the center of a smaller pond, it flashes a yellow beacon nightly right at goose-eye level and always - not frequently, not sometimes, not usually, but always - sends the honkers to ponds that have no such infernal beam.

Some are on the campus at Northern Kentucky University, and Ben Kuhn, head golf professional at Traditions Golf Club, a private golf club in Hebron, swears by Away With Geese.

"We put them out earlier this year and almost all the geese left," Kuhn said.

"Then we realized we had two nesting geese. As soon as their eggs hatched and the geese were big enough to fly, they left, too. We haven't seen any geese around here since."

This is the fourth business for Wells. He is the former owner of the former Fore and Aft, a popular Sayler Park floating restaurant that sank in 2005, long after Wells had sold it. More about the company is at www.awaywithgeese.com

He was co-owner of Embroidery Services, an Edgewood-based firm that he left in 1995, after being named one of a dozen Business Persons of the Year for the Commonwealth in 1994. Retirement beckoned but Wells found after about a year of five-day-a-week golf, retirement did not hold much allure.

He soon became chief executive of Accucounter, a Crestview Hills firm that counts and records shots fired by M-4 rifles. That's when the trade show yellow lights made such a big impression. He maintains an interest in that firm but devoted the past year to Away with Geese.

How big is the market? Giant.

John Neyer, chief executive of Neyer Management, the largest third-party real estate management firm in the region, said geese have become a problem for office complexes and there has been no solution. "They are a nuisance," he said. "The droppings are something that has to be attended to on a daily basis. Nothing we have tried has effectively gotten rid of them in long-term fashion."

Neyer manages 78 buildings and at 18 of those properties geese gather. He ordered one online as soon as he was told that the system exists.

"You don't want to be inhumane but you definitely want them someplace else," he said.

Corporations and office complexes with ponds, homeowner associations, parks, homes with ponds - all grapple with the problem of excessive geese, said Adam Hater, general manager of Jones Fish and Lake Management Inc.

"And the lawns there are just speckled with this manure," he said.

The Newtown-based fish farm and lake management company plans to sell Away With Geese in its 2007 catalog, which will be distributed to 60,000 clients. Will this light become a golden egg for goose-chasing Wells?

Hater has no doubt.

"I really think that sales are just going to take off," he said.