Nice Work

Geese are messy. That won’t be news to anyone who lives in the range of resident introduced Canada Geese, which is now basically the northern hemisphere. Playing fields, corporate ‘parks’, even tiny suburban lawns are covered with those smushy greenish caterpillars, and soon enough so are your shoes and pant cuffs.

Here in New Jersey and elsewhere, too, a tidy little industry has arisen to drive geese from open spaces public and private. The vans pull up and disgorge border collies and remote-controlled cars, the geese fly off, and the vans drive away. Dog-shaped robots will almost certainly be the next stage.

Unfortunately, the goose chasers–anatid dispersal specialists, I suppose–aren’t very discriminating. Just this winter, I’ve seen them driving off Brant (as in the photo above, from Liberty State Park) and Snow Geese, and apparently their efforts are making this week’s Long Island Pink-footed Goose even harder to find.

I wonder just how legal some of this is. Still, it’s nice work….