[Mom voice]
Just 'cuz the rest of 'Murricah is ignorant heathens don’t mean you should be too!
[/Mom voice]
That’s surprising. I read somewhere once that many people called them Canadian geese, which does seem like it ought to be correct, but they said that Canada geese was the correct term.
Interesting answers so far.
In terms of aggression, from all I’ve heard, it’s swans who are the real bullies anong water birds, but it sounds like Canada geese are right behind them. And obviously they are far more common than swans. I see about as many Canada geese in Oregon as I did pigeons in L.A. and Escondido.
Awwwww!!! You never disappoint!!
Swans tend to solitary / couples, not to flocking. Density has a quality all its own.
And in many areas geese are like Toyatas, simply everywhere in vast number whereas swans are like Bentleys: rare and noteworthy.
I used to work at an office in Newton, MA, with a window that looked out over a pond. The first year when a flock of Canada/Canadian geese swooped in to stay for a while, I was delighted - I decided to feed them my lunch scraps, and out I went.
Jeez. The first goose just about bit my hand off as I was pulling off a bit of sandwich to toss to them. I beat a hasty retreat.
Someone upthread mentioned swans. They’re also shitty and nasty.
I haven’t read the previous posts, so this has all probably been said, but this is one of those ‘don’t get me started topics’.
The college campus I lived on was ‘infested’ with geese. Thousands of them. They were every fucking where, all the fucking time. The problem is threefold:
1)They’re assholes. They’re assholes and they’re mean. It’s not like walking past a normal birds that scatter as you get closer. They won’t move out of the way and you have to go waaaay around them. Like, making sure to stay a good 10 feet away. Naturally, from time to time you tell yourself to suck it up and just walk past the stupid thing, and just like every other time you pulled that stunt, it hissed and snarled at you until you got further way. This usually meant walking off the cement path from the dorms to the school, which brings us to the next problem.
2)Fucking goose shit, every fucking where. And it’s worse if you have to walk in the grass (and 10x worse if it’s also raining and the grass is “muddy”). What I think a lot of people don’t know is that goose shit isn’t like bird shit, it’s like cat shit. Imagine so much cat shit that you had to watch every step you took so you don’t step in it. Most people wouldn’t even take the shortcut across the grass instead of the long way on the cement since you typically couldn’t get across the grass without stepping in it.
A lot of students had a ‘no shoes allowed’ rule in the dorms after tracking it in once or twice.
3)The fucking honking. The fucking honking that never fucking stops [I never realized there’s a Silence Of The Lambs joke in there somewhere]. Seriously, every night we fell asleep to dozens of geese honking and every morning it was the same thing. And if it’s right outside your window…well, there’s a reason a few people brought their pellet guns from home.
A while back, the campus made the news because they were considering spraying the grass with a deterrent to get rid of them and people were flipping the fuck out. It’s close enough to my current city to be local news, so I heard a lot of those complaints. I found myself constantly explaining all these things so many times to people who’s, and I’m not exaggerating, only experience with them is hearing/seeing them fly overhead from time time and seeing them out the window of a moving car as they drive past the (Lake Michigan) beach on their way to/from work. They had no reason to know how bad it was.
PS And of course we’d hear the occasional story of someone getting bit/attacked by one.
ETA, see, don’t get me started. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted similar rants in the past
That was me.
I’d like to see the Border Collies at the airports actually catch one. Or fifty.
Moved to IMHO (from FQ).
I live in one of the capitals of Canada goose territory, near the shores of the mighty Wascana, which is heavily populated with them from April to September, and I don’t remember ever having this issue. Sure, you keep an eye on them as you go past, just like any other wild animal, but I’ve never been honked or hissed at by them.
As for the honking, I love it. They should be arriving from down south soon, and they normally congregate on the ice on the lake, and they’re all honking at each other. In my mind, I think they’re doing the equivalent of “How was your flight?” “Great! How was yours!” “Really good - hey, there’s Charlie! How was Orlando?” etc. for a few days.
More like, “Fuck you, Moe!”; “Blow me, Harold!”; “Hey, Greg, tell your mate to get herself checked out; I think she gave me the clap last night!”; “Janice, if I catch another one of your goslings around my nest again, I’m going to rip his beak off and shove it up his cloaca, you hear me, bitch!”
Stranger
Here in the Midwest, Canada geese tend to aggregate in large numbers anywhere that there’s any open water, which includes the ponds and small lakes that we have in office parks, residential developments, and golf courses. For all of the reasons already listed, while they’re majestic at a distance, they are ill-tempered, loud, poop-generation devices at short range. And, as they’re protected by Federal law, there’s not much that can be done to effectively deal with the massive numbers of them that are around.
I worked in an office park that employed workers to physically remove the birds. They’d each guild one end of a wire, and walk around opposite sides of the little ponds, with the wire just above water level, physically bumping the birds. They could just land again, of course, but they found it annoying.
At nesting season, the same men would poke holes in the eggs and scramble them. Apparently the adults are protected but the eggs aren’t.
Maybe it was pointless, though. We still had a lot of geese.
Sure, you get them at home. We get them while they’re asshole tourists.
The very worst import from Canada, and I’m including poutine.
There is an elementary school with a field across the street from us, and when we walked our dogs in the field we had to maneuver around the goose shit, except when the dogs wanted to eat it. Plus they’d steal food from the kids during lunch.
At our central park they hired border collies to drive the geese away from the central lake. I’m not sure how successful they were.
Where I worked in New Jersey we had a pond, and goose poop all over the lawn and the parking lot. We also had a fox but I think he turned his nose up at the geese. One time they had to close the main entrance because an idiot goose decided to build a nest right on the sidewalk by it. And another goose had to be taken away when he decide to attack his reflection in the glass outer wall.
The wife of our general manager liked the damn geese, so we had to step carefully. I’m sure she was nice in many other ways.
When I was little and my family lived overseas, someone gave us a goose because they’d heard somewhere that Americans ate them for Christmas. I, being five years old, decided that the goose was a pet. I named it and I played with it all the time. When Christmas rolled around and my mom had it killed for dinner (she was nothing if not gracious about gifts), I was devastated and refused to even touch it.
When I reminisced about this with my mom, she said, “That thing was mean! It used to chase you around the yard all the time!” She’d had no idea at all that I thought it was my friend.
Some years later, I volunteered to look after my in-laws’ pets while they were out of town. They had a pair of geese along with the cat and dogs, and I was excited to get the chance to renew my great rapport with geese. I visited those creatures twice a day for a week and a half, and they never even acted like they’d seen me before, much less like I had been giving them food.
Luckily, the closest I get to geese nowadays is seeing a few fly over once a year. You can have 'em.
You may like them. You may hate them. You all must agree they’re the definition of “implacable.”
Canada Geese used to migrate (from Canada would believe it). Many stay year round in the states. That leads to overpopulation and over shitulation. I remember fondly seeing the flocks migrate. I never look at them fondly anymore.
This article explains why they don’t migrate anymore.
My earliest memory is being chased by an angry goose not long after I’d learnt to walk, so my hatred of them is ingrained.
Their poop is quite often acidic if they’ve been feasting on berries and will eat through concrete, car paintwork, armour plating etc. The acidic blood in Alien was based on goose poop I believe.