Comments

  1. Jazzlet says

    There was a Canada goose wandering along the road near our bus stop in down town Stockport on Saturday night, honking mournfully. The bus driver stopped for it, I don’t know how long he’d have waited but Mr J and another pasenger shooed the goose off the road so we could all get home.

  2. VolcanoMan says

    Thank goodness, the plague is finally starting to depart. Although you wouldn’t know it by looking around in the suburban parkland surrounding my place of residence (read: man-made unintentional goose paradise). I shudder to think how much worse things would be if there wasn’t a program of egg-oiling going on every summer, preventing many clutches of eggs from hatching and making the problem even worse. Normally, I don’t think there’s any modern justification for hunting, but I wish geese were tastier, so more people would go out and shoot them as they migrated. Just enough to keep the feces down to tolerable levels.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    Canadian geese are common in Sweden, where they crap all over everything.
    Silver lining: they are one of the few species that eat the invasive Spanish snail (called “murder snail” because they ruin the gardens).

  4. rockwhisperer says

    Husband and I are retiring in a couple of years and have built a house in the mountains, near the California-Nevada border. The nearest shopping (beyond a local general store that carries basic necessities) is an hour away, and the nearest well-supplied hardware store is twenty minutes further. When I go shopping, I have a long list of everything I can think we might need over the course of the next few weekends, and I hit up several stores. Midway in my shopping day, I pick up a sandwich and a soda and drive to a park to lunch. They have geese. Omigosh, they have geese. Year-round Canada geese. I imagine it’s hard for people to actually use the park in the spring, when the geese are nesting, since they defend their young fiercely.

    I still mostly live in the San Francisco Bay Area (California), and all our parks seem to have permanent geese populations. The birds weren’t nearly so common (especially as permanent populations) up to a couple of decades ago. It used to be possible to take a stroll around the city park a few blocks from our house without wading through goose droppings, but no longer.

    But I love watching the youngsters (from a safe distance!) in the spring, so that partially makes up for the rest of the inconvenience.

  5. JimB says

    If you have a huge fenced yard and don’t like taking care of it, get 3 or 4 geese. They will keep it all very closely trimmed.

    I rented a room from a couple back in the 80’s. They got 3 Gray Toulouse geese. 3 little babies that mostly imprinted on me and the lady of the house. After they were grown, only the 2 of us could do anything we wanted in the backyard. Anybody else, watch your back. They can be sneaky bastards.

    You don’t need a TV if you have geese in the backyard. Oh man. The goose stories I have…

  6. seachange says

    All y’all made me look this up. The Humane Society of the US has a pdf of how to deal with geese.