I golf with a lot of guys, and not one of them likes geese. They curse them, shoo them, pray their tee shot will skull one. Yet I know not one of them would actually shoot a golf-course goose if given the chance.
They are not me.
There is to my mind no sweeter sound than the report of a shotgun blast echoing in my ears, followed by the thud of a folded up Canada goose into the nearby mud.
“You horrible person!” I can already see the letters and e-mail you are about to send. Back off.
If I had a dollar for every hour I have spent crouching, shivering and cursing myself in the mud and near-unbearable cold waiting for a goose to fly over, the only way we would be talking today is if you were the next bettor over at the roulette wheel.
Goose hunting is perfectly legal, but quite an inexact science, which is why golf courses like Meridian Golf Club outside Greenwood Village are overrun with them. Come Saturday, Meridian is inviting hunters to sign up for the chance to bag their limit.
“Of course, we’re not trying to be a hunting club,” explains Jim Shoemaker, the general manager. “But the geese this time of year are very destructive. It becomes very expensive for us.”
He estimates nearly 10,000 geese come through Meridian’s 200 acres every day now. They love the course’s greens, pecking them out past the root, a pocketbook nightmare for any club, he says.
This will be the fourth year the club has allowed hunting, which, he said, will be done in the evening as a way to be good neighbors.
Does the hunting make much of a difference?
Over the past three years, Shoemaker said, hunters have averaged about 300 goose kills a year. Compared with 10,000 daily geese, it has hardly stopped the problem, he said.
Yet the question in my brain was, well, is golf course goose-hunting legal?
I called Tyler Baskfield, a state Division of Wildlife spokesman.
As long as the golf course is outside the city limits and not ringed with houses that could cause a safety issue, the Meridian Golf Club hunt is “perfectly legitimate,” he said.
The true problem is geese can drop an average of a pound to three pounds of poop per goose daily and, along with decimated greens and fairways, that is sheer hell to course groundskeepers.
“What the course is doing is no different from a farmer on the Eastern Plains saying, ‘Guys, come shoot and thin out my geese,’ ” Baskfield said.
Some city courses apply for federal permits to oil and/or shake goose eggs in the nest, he said. The oil and the shaking kills the goose embryos, but tricks the mother goose from re-nesting elsewhere, thereby keeping the goose population down.
“We actually have no problem as long as safety rules apply,” Baskfield said. “We want people to take advantage of our recurring natural resources, and geese are certainly recurring. Hunting is the management technology of choice. Go out and have a great hunt.”
Thing is, you cannot go on this hunt unless you are a member of Meridian, Shoemaker said. It is simply a benefit the club grants to licensed hunter members.
Dang. Can you imagine bagging a limit, and later shooting 18 holes, all in the same day?
Sadly, I can.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
