In the instant before finger touched trigger, a flicker of recognition flashed through my mind.
I could swear the goose flapping out there beyond my gun barrel was the same one that committed an unspeakable act on the eighth green of the local golf course just a few days earlier. Or was it the one that deposited a trail of unmentionables along the sidewalk as I made my way through the park? Same long beak, same beady eyes, same … well, we won’t go there in a family newspaper.
What proved absolutely certain, midway through the Oct. 1-9 northern Front Range season designed specifically to make life slightly less comfortable for what in the eyes of many have become nuisance birds, was that this goose was dead set on dinner at a Larimer County turf farm.
The farm’s owner was no less pleased at the invasion than golfers who vainly try to keep both their shoes and putting lines clean.
“If we haven’t been here hunting in three or four days, we get a call to come flush the geese out,” said Mark Beam, who leases a hunting pit at a strategic point in this 500-acre swatch of premier blue grass.
“Actually, we pay a pretty penny for the privilege of chasing geese off the field,” laughed Beam, who never met a goose hunting spot he didn’t like.
With Tom Hartley and Shane Kingsley, his partners in Stillwater Outfitters, Beam was on sort of a busman’s holiday both to clear the field and enact a certain revenge on this horde of geese that has taken possession of many public places along the Front Range.
An estimated 30,000 greater Canada geese reside year-round in essentially urban areas from the Denver metro area north to Fort Collins.
They twist most local residents into a sort of love/hate conundrum. While it can be exhilarating to hear the honk of wild geese overhead, it’s also nice to be able to look up when you feel like it.
So it was several years ago that the Colorado Wildlife Commission mandated a special early season in hopes that a bit of hunting pressure at least might encourage some of the geese to take their business elsewhere. The region contains plenty of resident geese to offer hunters a little extra opportunity and, with few natural enemies to disrupt nesting, there’s always lots more on the way.
Actually, these urban geese are the manifestation of one of the state’s grandest wildlife success stories. More than four decades ago, DOW biologist Gurney Crawford, Colorado’s “Father Goose,” used eggs from wild flocks to introduce Canada geese to Fort Collins lakes in hopes of imprinting them to an area that had no prior goose habitation.
This population not only grew prodigiously, but over time influenced hordes of migratory birds to winter in the area, transforming northeast Colorado into one of the nation’s hotbeds for goose hunting.
Like so many Colorado visitors, these birds opted to move in year-round, raise families and take up golf. As any linkster who ever tried to line up a putt through a minefield of droppings with a $5 Nassau on the line will tell you, geese aren’t always the most lovable creatures in the world.
Beam tells the story, perhaps apocryphal, of a golfing group that stages an unusual tournament at a private club during which they stash a shotgun in their bags. Deal is, a player gets to lop one shot off his score for every goose he shoots, a novel way to score a birdie.
The same antipathy holds for a sod farmer who winds up with a lot of noxious weed seeds scattered through the crop.
Because geese love tender grass shoots, they’ll keep flocking to the fresh sod all winter. Decoys spread in welcome, the Stillwater boys will be there to greet them, secure in the knowledge there’ll always be more where those came from.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” radio KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
