Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Geese cause e-coli??

So I received this email at work today in NC:
[NAME REMOVED] has very valid reasons for doing all we can to humanely remove the geese from the park. Number 1. Goose droppings, for lack of a better word, are full of E-Coli Bacteria which presents an infection risk for all. We have many incidents of the geese attacking people due to nesting. The babies are cute but most of them end up dead due to being run over by cars, because the geese are living in an unnatural setting, an office park instead of in the wild where mother nature intended them to be. Folks don't see the dead goslings, as we try to take them away ASAP. We don't like seeing that and we don't enjoy it. The ponds were not built to attract geese, they are part of zoning and building code regulations that deal with run off from drives and parking areas so natural waterways and springs are not contaminated.

So, this is what you call irony.

We heat up our world with greenhouse gases/political BS/carbon, to confuse the goosian (yes I coined my very own demonym) internal clocks so they stick around rather than scheduling their traditional flight north as the weather begins to warm. We also drain their wetlands where they DID live up north, taking from them the natural setting for a gosling playground.

So those geese who have decided to stick around have very little wetlands or woodlands to hide in any more...it is not as if geese are deep-woods animals. They require water, not 500 acres of woods.

And yet we complain that they are hassling us in our cookie cutter office park because they have the potential for causing us sickness.

Perhaps a wiser population would realize WHY they are here, and that they don't prefer a parking lot to a secluded marsh. Alas, such is not the case. Instead it is presented as a problem of the geese being inconsiderate to us...their babies throw themselves in front of our cars (we of course cannot slow down) and they go to the bathroom in inconvenient places. And e-coli danger? It's much higher from gulls and other birds who eat OUR TRASH.

Geese are the symptom of our problem. They are not the problem!


Catharsis!

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