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IPFS News Link • Environment

How to Make Peace with Canada Geese

• arclein

Last spring, according to Lyle Morin, the university's manager of general services, there were 300 adult Canada geese nesting on campus. With a student population of around 30,000, the ratio is significant: encounters happen. Male geese protect their nests aggressively. The wing protuberance at what we would consider an elbow in humans is called an alula, and it can strike like a mallet. Also, the average adult goose, which can weigh anywhere between 3 and 9 kilograms, produces about 1 kilogram of droppings a day (the weight of a cabbage), at a rate of one unit every ten to twenty minutes, so encounters happen underfoot too. And it's not just a campus problem. In Winnipeg, come spring, pairs of Canada geese nest in highway medians; along retention ponds; in the Ikea parking lot where I've seen them stare down a Subaru and win (the Subaru backed off); and outside the Royal Canadian Mint, where they eat and eat and eat the grass and then, every ten to twenty minutes, return it, tra


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