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Comment by tony_cannistra | Hacker News Reader

If I had to choose between listening to a bunch of geese minding their own business and a buzzy drone, I'd choose the geese.

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I tolerate geese because every spring small fuzzy babies show up and it's adorable to watch them waddle around

Our itinerant Canadian geese have an annual ritual:

  - Nest in the favorite spot
  - Chase off the other ducks and geese who come to visit
  - Hatch 6-7 fuzzy babies
  - Parade the babies around for a few days
  - Lead the babies to the coyotes (coywolves) waiting at the treeline
  - Depart for ten months, repeat

Sounds about right, but you missed biting and honking at random shiny car bumpers all day and dive-bombing people on their daily walk.

And carpeting everything with an even layer of poop

Wait, what? Can you elaborate on the part about the coyotes?

You're saying they have an annual ritual of infanticide? That's. Horrifying. I wonder if this particular flock suffered some kind of trauma.

Nothing so complicated. The geese are just compelled by nature to walk into the woods with their goslings shortly after hatching. And coyotes have their own habits, of course.

There's a reason geese lay so many eggs. If they all survived, the population would quadruple every year.

The average Canada goose lives for about 20 years in the wild, so if you think about it... for population to remain steady, more than 99% of goslings have to die.

Still, every year I root for the goslings. Coyotes have plenty of other things to eat. None so convenient and tasty, perhaps.

Bizarre! Thanks for elaborating.

Predation and parasitism are both so fascinating.

Very interesting. We had woods around my geese's nesting area. I'm not sure if we had coyotes (wouldn't be surprised if I never saw them). We did have ponds with the occasional alligator. That might be enough to thin the flock.

I don't know about coywolves, but if you live near coyotes, you'll hear them if you don't see them.

The drones would probably be very active initially, and then rarely once the geese have learned that if they land they will be harassed. Other than safety situations at airports though, it seems more cruel than anything to drive them off. The article implies that it's to get them to migrate to warmer areas, but will they actually do this?

Or, like how ravens were introduced to control the pigeon population in US cities and now we have both, we’d just end up perpetually with both drones buzzing about AND geese.

Also the fact that Canadian geese are smart and aggressive means it’s only a matter of time before they realize they can likely break the drones

So long as they don't mate with the drones and create buzzing, honking offspring.

so much poop in the grass though

Something that benefits all parties then: automated goose poop removers.

I don't think you appreciate just how much poop we are talking about. One example, Coyote Point is a huge park near San Francisco. Massively large grass fields and hills etc. Very beautiful but the fields are largely unusable because every square inch of grass is covered in goose poop. The playgrounds and the CuriOddyssey museum are cool though, so still worth a visit with the kiddos.

thats fertilizer

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