Silverware Thief

Remember those neighborhood geese I wrote about previously? They have made themselves unwelcome.

I have watched with some amusement as the neighborhood has soured to the geese. I wonder how many of the local residents saw where things were headed when the geese took up residence. I’m not surprised at how it has turned out, but I think if other residents had possessed more foresight they wouldn’t have been so complacent when the geese first arrived. When the geese first moved in everyone probably thought they were a fascinating, and perhaps even cute, curiosity. But a flock of geese doesn’t really fit in with refined suburban life.

Geese eat a lot of grass. They poop in equally prodigious quantities. Geese are poop machines. They wander across your lawn, chomping on your grass with their front end and firing of green went volleys with their back end. I, having raised geese, am quite familiar with this. The other local residents were probably shocked and appalled by the invasion of manure. Just about anything else would probably have been suffered with some amount of forbearance, but among the denizens of civilized life poop in your lawn and on your driveway is an unforgivable sin.

The first to begin souring toward the geese was probably the owner of the pond. The geese, of course, enjoyed his pond. But when they got out to enjoy the grass of his spacious lawn they pooped all over his lawn and driveway. He suffered the poop invasion the worst. I’m sure he didn’t appreciate it in the beginning when the geese pooped all over his lawn, but perhaps because he had such a large lawn he thought he could put up with it. But I’m sure he really didn’t like it when they started pooping on his driveway. And it became unbearable when he decided to put his house up for sale and the geese were pooping all over everything. Geese poop doesn’t increase resale value.

It was with a mixture of amusement and sympathy that I watched him shovel the geese poop off his driveway, and attempt to evict the geese by throwing rocks at them in the pond and sending his dog in swimming after them. In the good old days one blast from a shotgun would have sent the geese out of there never to come back. But you’re not allowed to fire a gun inside the town limits, so Mr. Homeowner was left to futilely toss stones at the geese and have them swim round in circles and mock him for his impotence. No doubt passing traffic thought he was the most cruel and barbaric of men for harassing the geese. Everyone thinks you should be nice to geese–until they start pooping in your back yard.

Not content with one yard, the geese expanded their grazing grounds. They had no problem with crossing the street for what they saw as better grass. Now there were more people chasing geese out of their yards. And, since if the geese weren’t in one yard they were in another, it became some overgrown version of hot-potato where everyone tried to get the geese to stay in someone else’s yard. The geese were unperturbed. They would stroll away only to come strolling back later.

And strolling was what they did. They strolled through yards as if they owned the place, and meandered across the road as if the world would stop for them. Which it did. Some people seemed to take pleasure in stopping their cars and watching the geese slowly cross the street. Others did not, and their numbers increased as the geese began to make a habit out of sauntering across the road as if they expected traffic to stop until they were good and ready to reach the other side. There was a marked increase in impatient horn honking, and cars forcing the geese out of the road. I am actually a little surprised no geese ended up as roadside debris, but I guess motorist irritation was not such that they were willing to risk damaging their nice cars. The geese are too stupid to realize how lucky they were.

They own the road

In the end the pond owner did manage to sell his house and the geese have become less of a problem to the refined citizens of this locale. Not because the stone throwing, shouting, geese chasing, or horn honking has terrified the geese into leaving. No, they still come around. But I think with the new generation of geese grown to adulthood the flock has become much larger and they found their grazing grounds a little small.

Summer is waning late and they are preparing to head south and until then the flock often splits up smaller groups for more distributed foraging. Rather than the entire group taking up the pond there usually is only one of the geese families hanging about, and they often will move on after a few hours. The new owners of the pond at first valiantly attempted to keep the geese away, (standing guard all one evening and shouting to chase them away any time the geese flew in to land,) but now seem to have given up, and only chase them off the driveway and back into the pond. With the goslings grown and the geese now flying to forage over a greatly expanded domain the local residents have been delivered from the need of chasing geese off their lawns. Only rarely do the geese stick around long enough to cross the road and interrupt traffic.

Perhaps everyone thinks they have survived the worst and their geese troubles are over. But with a little more thought they might rest uneasy. I wonder what will happen when the geese come back next year to hatch more offspring. Can anyone say, “Double the trouble?”

We’ll see.