Goose Attack II: Aggressive Fowls Force Ohio School To Move Meet

COLUMBUS, OH – Maybe it’s time to think about another border wall. One with Canada. To stop the latest scourge on our nation: Canada geese.

For the second time this week, these winged monsters got their dander up and threatened humankind. The most recent run-in with geese-kind forced a Columbus, Ohio, school district to postpone a middle-school track meet.

While no one was physically attacked prior to the meet scheduled for Thursday afternoon, the geese certainly made their presence known and were not going to give an inch, said Jacqueline Bryant, the communications manager for the Columbus City Schools.

The pair of geese have a nest near the track at Columbus Africentric Early College and the kids would have had to run past it, Bryant said. Prior to the meet’s start, a pair of athletic directors went to investigate the situation and the geese got agitated, she said. Apparently, they flew after the adults, but thankfully no children were involved.

"These geese are very aggressive, so the track can’t be utilized," Bryant said.

And, she noted, because the birds are federally protected, there is little the district can do but wait for the geese’s eggs to hatch and the goslings to move along with their geese parents.

Until then, there will be no meets on the track, Bryant said. Fortunately, she said, other tracks are available for meets and teams can still practice there, but just avoid that part of the track.

Early this week, another pair of geese mixed it up with a high school golfer in Adrian, Michigan. In that case, the goose flew after Concord High School golfer Isaac Couling and tackled him near the seventh hole at Wolf Creek Golf Club.

In an interview with Detroit TV station WDIV, Couling laughed off the attack, saying , "everybody thinks it's funny that getting attacked by a goose made me famous."

The geese, though, are doing what Mother Nature programmed them to do: protect their space and their young, said Robert Mulvihill, an ornithologist, at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Canada geese, he explained, are generally harmless to humans, though he cautioned that due to their size, they could be dangerous if they encountered a curious toddler.

The human-geese interactions "can, potentially, escalate," Mulvihill said. "It depends on how the human reacts. (The geese) hiss, they might rush toward the human. It's all a bluff."

Thus, if humans run into unhappy geese, give them some space, said Mulvihill. "They are a formibable bird. You are not going to change the nature of a goose. Give them a wide berth and a little extra distance.

And about the notion of building a border wall to keep the geese out? Mulvihill declined to get into such politics, but suggested that we’re stuck with them.

“These are American Canada geese, so they don’t migrate,” Mulvihill said. And, although they have northern roots, which is how they got the “Canada” part of their name, “it would seem that Canada geese have made themselves at home through many parts of the United States.”

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