Geese

Gunnar Berger, 2, of Falling Waters, W.Va., feeds geese Monday afternoon at Williamsport's Riverbottom Park.

Q: We live in a lovely subdivision in which almost every home backs up to a pond. It's really pretty, until the geese arrive. They spend lot of time in my yard (and all my neighbors' yards) and leave lots of presents. I need to know what to do with what they leave behind. Our yards are littered - really! Four families, about 10 chicks per family, can mean as many as 40 geese in our yard at any time for hours daily, which makes a real mess. How do I keep their mess off my property?

Too many geese in city park, rich boys don't have any thing to hunt...hmmm Two incredibly huge problems arose in the state of Maryland over the past two weeks that need to be addressed: 1. Hagerstown has too many geese. 2. The rich boys of Baltimore don't have anything to hunt. Am I missing something here? Isn't the solution obvious? On one hand we have City Park, where administrators say too many rooks are spoiling the broth. Or, actually, they are creating something of a broth out of the lake, and I'm not talking about the type of broth you would wish to sip on a winter's day when you have a headcold.

A gaggle of geese holds up traffic asa it crosses Pennsylvania Avenue during Tuesday afternoon's rainfall.

dank@herald-mail.com Hagerstown's City Park is missing what for years was a common sight - large flocks of Canada geese. The exodus is no accident. Since July 2000, the city has paid Goose Vamoose in Frederick County $12,413 to have dogs and a remote-controlled boat chase geese and other birds away from City Park and Pangborn Park, city Assistant Finance Director Ray Foltz said. The company had some success last year, but Hagerstown Mayor William M. Breichner said this year the impact of the dogs and boat is really noticeable.

By JULIE E. GREENE Staff Writer Hagerstown park officials have heard some citizen proposals to discourage ducks and geese from nesting at City Park, including feed containing birth control, a city official said. Local attorney Wiley Rutledge presented the Parks Board with a petition last Thursday signed by 1,093 people who were opposed to proposals to ban feeding or shake eggs, said Department of Public Works officials. Public Works Manager Doug Stull has said there are too many ducks and Canada geese at the park.

I started collecting critters under the working theory that they were, in some ways, superior to humans. While acknowledging that they might not have our mental horsepower, I also assumed they lacked petty, human traits such as jealousy, vindictiveness, selfishness and the like. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If anything, animals can trump most of our undesirable characteristics, and the only reason we don't hear more about it is that animals do not stupidly hire press agents and media consultants to compound the problem.

For as long as I can remember, the dove season has opened at the beginning of September, which used to be long before any of the other bird hunting seasons. This made dove hunting a special event for the diehard bird hunters. Things have changed over the past few years. September now includes the beginning of the early season for resident or non-migratory Canada geese. This season is designed to allow hunters to take some of the many geese that have nested in our area and stay here on a year-round basis.

ANNAPOLIS - Maryland farmers lost $10.5 million in potential crop production income due to wildlife damage last year, according to the Maryland Field Office of USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. The survey results were collected and tabulated from the agency's fall acreage and production survey, with nearly 1,500 reports tabulated. Damage statewide was attributed to the following wildlife species with the corresponding estimated percent loss due to each species: deer, 83.8 percent; resident geese, 6.4 percent; migrant geese, 5.8 percent; groundhogs, 2.1 percent; bear, 0.9 percent; and other wildlife species, 1 percent.

Last Monday was a bitterly cold day in our area. The temperature was in the teens, and a biting northwest wind made it miserable if you were not dressed to be outside. Most people avoid outside activities on days like this, but the late afternoon found us hunkered down in lay-out blinds, scanning the air for hungry geese. We were about as sure as you can get that the birds would be there. They had arrived just before dark the previous three evenings. We were set up in the exact spot in the big corn field that the birds had fed the evening before.

I started collecting critters under the working theory that they were, in some ways, superior to humans. While acknowledging that they might not have our mental horsepower, I also assumed they lacked petty, human traits such as jealousy, vindictiveness, selfishness and the like. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If anything, animals can trump most of our undesirable characteristics, and the only reason we don't hear more about it is that animals do not stupidly hire press agents and media consultants to compound the problem.

o If you like reading Tim Rowland, you'll love watching him. See what else Tim has to say We've all seen those miserable, cutesy little feature items about dissimilar animal species that hook up to form an unlikely bond -- a dog and a cat, a goat and a chicken, James Carville and Mary Matalin. These spots annoy me as much as the next person, so you can imagine my horror when, on Little Farm by the Creek, a miniature horse and a goose got together and decided that no one was going to out-Walt Disney them.

If you stumble across an animal that doesn't eat in the winter, let me know. I'm not talking about a dog, cat, Hannah Montana or anything else that, for the most part, takes its feed indoors. I mean the big kind. The sort that eats out in the cold. On milder days, there's a certain romance to taking the alpacas, donkeys, goats and geese a flake of hay or a scoop of grain as the sun is peeking over the hills and then again as it's disappearing with an orange glow in the west.

Gunnar Berger, 2, of Falling Waters, W.Va., feeds geese Monday afternoon at Williamsport's Riverbottom Park.

Water, water everywhere and what great photos it makes. · The Herald-Mail is always looking for the best recent photos from the Tri-State area. So many amazing things, big and small, happen in the area that we don't get to see. · On the weekly Gallery page, we do not have space for family portraits, posed scenes or news photos that are published elsewhere in the newspaper, but we will make room for amateur photographers to share their talent and show us some different shots.

A gaggle of geese holds up traffic asa it crosses Pennsylvania Avenue during Tuesday afternoon's rainfall.

Commentary Hagerstown has certainly had its go-rounds with geese, cataclysmic upheavals that I've always just sort of written off as Hagerstown being Hagerstown. Every year at "City" Park there is some goose-related crisis that touches off endless meetings at City Hall entertaining ideas for reducing the goose population while avoiding the PR disaster of having PETA-types jumping down our throats faster than Cheese Doodles on a stoop-sitter. Only here, I thought, would it be possible to have a protracted debate centering on the ethics of shaking goose eggs so they wouldn't hatch.

Q: We live in a lovely subdivision in which almost every home backs up to a pond. It's really pretty, until the geese arrive. They spend lot of time in my yard (and all my neighbors' yards) and leave lots of presents. I need to know what to do with what they leave behind. Our yards are littered - really! Four families, about 10 chicks per family, can mean as many as 40 geese in our yard at any time for hours daily, which makes a real mess. How do I keep their mess off my property?

ANNAPOLIS - Maryland farmers lost $10.5 million in potential crop production income due to wildlife damage last year, according to the Maryland Field Office of USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. The survey results were collected and tabulated from the agency's fall acreage and production survey, with nearly 1,500 reports tabulated. Damage statewide was attributed to the following wildlife species with the corresponding estimated percent loss due to each species: deer, 83.8 percent; resident geese, 6.4 percent; migrant geese, 5.8 percent; groundhogs, 2.1 percent; bear, 0.9 percent; and other wildlife species, 1 percent.

Commentary Since its closure, the former Fort Ritchie base known now as PenMar has always resembled a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, so I suppose it was just a matter of time until it got laid low by critters. Geese, specifically. Ducks would have been better, but hey, I have to work with what they give me. Richard D. Rook, executive director of PenMar Development Corp., says up to 800 geese at a time like to chill at the base's lakes, and that their leavins' can amount to a pound and a half each.