Our office building sits on a naturalized chunk of land with artificial ponds and surrounding woods, so every year we witness the wonders of nature through the life cycle of the Canada goose. At this point in your reading, if you’ve ever encountered Canada geese in your lifetime, you’re thinking about their poo. We have the same problem. Those ever-present green deposits that look like cheap Lincoln Log castoffs are all over not just the lawns, but our pathways and parking lot. To paraphrase Richard Dreyfuss’ character, Hooper, in Jaws, all Canada geese do are poop, swim and eat and make little geese. This is the season for little geese, so we have poo in all sizes, all summer long until at least September.
At this stage the youngsters are in their tweens: past the point of cute fuzzy little waddlers and at the phase in which they have fat bodies, longer necks and no discernable feathers. Still they toddle with their parents and eat and poop grass as they move along. For us office workers who have finally been granted the privilege of wearing summer sandals as part of our seasonal dress code, nothing ruins a pair of good shoes like green goose poo.
As part of the effort to lessen the dangers of slipping on poo in the parking lot, the building staff, in cooperation with our maintenance personnel, decided to install a coyote decoy, hoping to detour the little guys to points elsewhere on the property.
I’ll hobble, and I’ll bobble, and the wind’ll blow my a** down.
Yes, that’s pretty much what it looks like, pinned legless to the lawn by one of the pathways. Whoever decided that decoys shouldn’t have legs must have been a few decafs short of functional. It hasn’t worked: in fact, the geese congregate around the thing while continuing to eat and poop. I found one of these pictured in a catalog for about $60. For that much money, I want a coyote with legs. It might also help if it moved menacingly or something. It reminds me of those thin sheet metal versions some public schools have installed in their athletic fields. They just don’t cut it if they don’t move. Heck, we’ve sunk to a new low if even the geese can recognize bad garden decorations.
Some online guides say to use fake dead geese or alligator decoys, or put swans on the property. Considering we also have foxes about in that area, I would not like to see a critter smackdown of any kind between foxes, geese and/or swans. If man can’t get them to move on, a swan isn’t going to help. Besides, they poop, too.
Anybody know how to diaper a goose?
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