Just from general online chitchat, including on Facebook and other social media and forum sites, I notice that many people complain about Canada geese. They sometimes tell Canadians that they need to come down here and collect their geese because we don’t want them.
I see Canada geese all the time. I see flocks of them flying overhead. I see flocks of them walking or swimming around the paddock of a local high school where they have an animal husbandry program. And wherever patches of land are filled up by water in the wet season, I see them floating around, sometimes just a pair, and sometimes a whole flock of them.
But they don’t cause any trouble for me. What is the issue that other people seem to have with Canada geese?
Clearly you’ve never had to deal with or clean up the phenomenal amount of shit they produce, and how aggressive they can be in protecting nesting grounds even if you aren’t going anywhere near their nest.
Still not as bad as domestic geese, though. If there is any animal more of an asshole than a mature raccoon, it is the domestic goose. The fuckers don’t even taste that good.
Yeah. I quickly learned to hate Canadian geese at college having to navigate the pathways next to the lake to get to class. You quickly get very tired of stepping around goose turds and avoiding a charging hissing feather ball of malevolence. You start thinking of Christmas dinner.
Is it mainly about them shitting on cars? I can certainly understand that problem. It would also explain why I’m virtually unaffected; I have a garage and, TBH, we don’t go out all that much. So our exposure, at least as far as our car is concerned, is minimal.
Form 300 feet away they are Majestic Nature Personified. Dedicated to their life partner, gloriously and endlessly garrulous, and beautiful of shape and graceful of behavior. Their hatchlings through teenagers are that heart-warming combination of cute & ugly that all youthful birds are; but mostly cute. And you can’t help but admire the dedicated parenting going on.
From inside 20 feet they are feathered assholes who will poop on the tops of your shoes, the bottoms of your shoes, all over your landscaping, all over your welcome mat(!), and bite you if you dare to walk towards them. And that’s before they’ve laid eggs and are guarding a nest you can’t see. Once they’ve laid eggs, turn all that up to eleventy. Feathered Taliban; that’s what they are.
I loved seeing them upon our lake or in our sky. Hearing a batch of 50+ of them wake up at 3am and start having a conversation that took 10 minutes to fade out was heavenly.
Clearing their shit off my boat, dock, and deck was … less than heavenly. While being attacked. Same thing when they invaded and colonized the decorative water feature at my office. Assholes. Pure assholes.
I work with a guy from Mexico who doesn’t speak a lot of English. A Canadian goose made a nest by one of the paddock gates and hissed at him while he was putting horses out. He comes back to us after and says, “I do not like the cobra chicken.”
I’ve never seen them shit on cars. They mostly shit on the ground. But they shit ALL OVER THE GROUND. If you want to walk anywhere near where they’ve been grazing, you will notice the copious shit.
Geese are problematic partly because they congregate in large flocks.
(I am actually less enamored of swans, but they are less gregarious, and that makes a difference.)
T. H. White held geese up as the epitome of all that is wonderful and free in The Once and Future King–making me wonder if he had ever actually seen a goose.
Something happened to me that is part of what annoys people. They slowly paddle their way across a street at a crosswalk. You can find videos on YouTube with the same thing happening:
I used to cook at a restaurant that specialized in game fowl, so we had a wide selection of different poultry and (when in season) wild game to compare. The domestic goose was always at the bottom of almost everyone’s scale. I’d rather eat a grackle than a goose. They make great eggs, though.
They shit on every damn thing, even somehow on the undersides of benches and in a neat pattern on a grassy slope that causes you to slide right down into the pond that has been so thoroughly polluted by goose droppings that everything except the frogs have given up and died. They are so…fucking…awful! I hate them more than pigeons, and I hate pigeons almost as much as I hate The United Way.
Re Canada geese, There are 2 mated pairs that nest each year on my pond. I can handle the 4 of them and we don’t bother each other. But I, too, have experienced the carpet of goose poop in several parks with water nearby in my area. The parks are ruined for use by humans until the geese depart and the poop composts. Nasty!
Admittedly, the skin is the best part of a goose, followed by the fat, which is excellent for roasting potatoes or making popcorn. But i like the flesh well enough. It’s certainly a lot tastier than venison.