Seawolves Country? More like Geese Land
By Michael Kelly Stony Brook University likes to call itself “Seawolves Country” in honor of its mascot, an over-sized wolf adorned in a red uniform. But most students have a story to tell about a different animal that calls the campus home: the Canada geese. Whether gliding along the surface of Roth Pond or taking their daily migration around the perimeter of Mendelsohn and H-Quad in daily searches for the best grass, the geese seem to be everywhere. Two such students with a story are a pair of friends named Chris Hessel and Hans Zhong. Hessel and Zhong were outside playing wiffle-ball on a warm fall day last year, hanging out with a few of their friends. The young college students were playing in the grassy area in the middle of H-Quad residence hall. About 20 feet away, a few dozen lounging geese grazed on the grass, separated from the boys by some plants and a paved walkway. The game played on. Zhong peered out at the pitcher from under his Yankees baseball cap, standing with the skinny, yellow bat in his hands. Hessel crouched in the field, waiting to make a play on the ball. Suddenly, they heard a loud chorus of squawking and the whooshing sound of air coming off the feathery wings of the geese. The boys snapped their heads over to the field where the geese had been and saw the geese flying at them. Most of the boys ran for cover from the low-flying gaggle of geese; one dropped to the ground, and another, Zhong, stayed put and watched them fly by, not more than a few feet over his head. Laughing, the boys returned to their game when the gaggle had passed. “He stood there,” Hessel said of Zhong. A look of amusement crossed his face as he recalled the scene. “He didn’t move.” “What was there to be afraid of?” Zhong muttered, scrunching up his face. “You don’t want to get crapped on,” Hessel said. Such is the sentiment in regard to the geese for more than a few students at Stony Brook. The university is home to about 100 Canadian geese, says a recent study done by a psychology research group. But the population could expand drastically. There are 15,000-20,000 Canada geese who call Nassau and Suffolk County home, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The makeup of the university's campus—12,000 acres of grassy land, mixed with scattered ponds—could prove to be an attractive breeding ground. School authorities, however, don’t think the population would ever get to a size that would require thinning. Terry Hulse, the manager of environmental protection at Stony Brook, doubts the university would ever try to get a geese-thinning license—a goose depredation permit—from the government. She said in an e-mail that the university can take measures to discourage geese from residing on campus—addling eggs, destroying nests—legally, without acquiring a permit. Physically removing the geese is also an option. But what to do with the animals after removing them can be a bit of a problem. “No Canadian Geese may be live-trapped and released to a different location,” she wrote. “They come back anyway.” Most students seem fine with the geese sticking around. In fact, many seem to like the geese, though there are a few who won’t go near them. Andy Friedman, a sophomore, said that he has seen, and been amused by, students who refuse to walk near the geese. “I like when people go really far out of their way to go around the geese,” said Friedman, who lives in H-Quad. “Some people are really scared of the geese. I mean, scared enough that they go out of their way to avoid them.” Friedman said there is an area that could serve as a shortcut through Mendelsohn Quad, which is adjacent to H-Quad, that leads directly to the Student Union, a frequent destination for hungry students. But the area is usually filled with geese. “So some people just don’t go over there,” he said. A goose in his way doesn’t dissuade Friedman from where he wants to go. Sometimes the geese do cause him a slight delay, but it isn't because he's afraid of them. Rather, it’s because he likes to go out of his way to walk through the geese. “I usually try to walk right through them,” he said, smiling. “It makes me feel really brave if I do that.” Friedman appears to be one of many Stony Brook students who actually do enjoy the companionship of the feathery creatures. Most students complain about the droppings the geese leave, but they are otherwise amused by the geese. A collection of such Stony Brook students is found in the Facebook group “I Totally Want To Catch One of Those Geese.” The nearly 300-members group contains humorous discussion about trying to catch geese and experiences students have had relating to the geese. Gracey Oh wrote on the group's page that she “saw some guys trying 2 catch a goose in the rain today.” It took less than three hours for Eric Yu to confirm it was him and his friend that Oh saw. A running joke on the site is that the geese are out to get Stony Brook students. One student, Michelle Nilsen, wrote that she was almost attacked by a goose. Another girl, Jazmin Torres, told a story about warning people she saw approaching some geese. Torres wrote, “A couple of days ago, I saw a couple of girls trying to play with the geese near Mount, and the geese started glaring at them. I of course started yelling at them to run away before it was too late.” But the group banter seems to be all in good fun. Two members of the group that have taken a particular interest in the geese are Ethan Fox and Mei Liu, who have both posted photos of the geese on the group's page. Fox wrote in a Facebook message that the geese “add a wild flavor to the campus, that it otherwise wouldn’t have." He said “It’s not everywhere you can walk to class and bump into a flock of large birds.” Fox took the pictures of the geese the day he got his first digital camera. However, approaching the geese to snap the shots wasn't as easy as he thought it would be. “If you get too close to some of them (probably the males), they will hiss at you,” Fox wrote. “Needless to say, if you've never heard a goose hiss before (and furthermore, if you had no idea that geese could hiss in the first place), it's a tad startling.” One time, the geese surprised Liu as well, but for a different reason. A New York City native, Liu said in a Facebook message that she hadn’t seen many animals up close before coming to Stony Brook. The idea that geese could actually fly came as a surprise to her while she watched her friend try to chase two of the grass-grazing geese on a sunny fall day last semester. “One of my friends was literally chasing them and really wanted to catch one,” Liu wrote. “She trapped them into a corner and they flew, I was so shocked.” “They’re birds, of course they can fly!” she wrote. Not everyone's memories of the geese are happy ones. If there is a dark side to the geese, it is that they leave a trail wherever they go. On average, Canada geese eat for about 12 hours per day, leaving about two pounds of droppings each day. And students aren't happy about it. As Luisa Ladeveze puts it on the "I Totally Want To Catch One of Those Geese" group page, “i love the geese! but not their shit.” Most students echo Ladaveze. “They leave their shit everywhere! All over the grass and the road! And I think I've had my fair shares of accidentally stepping on them,” Liu said. “It's only a real nuisance when you get to the areas they like the most; those with a lot of open grass,” Fox said. “Oh, and Roth pond. Then it's like a minefield.” Athletes also have a problem with the droppings. While teams that play indoors are able to escape the geese droppings, the baseball team has no such luxury. Mike Errigo, a pitcher on the baseball team, says the geese leave their mark on the team’s practice field when the team is not playing. “Every practice there is a bunch of geese crap,” the 21-year-old wrote in a Facebook message. But Errigo is one of the lucky ones. As a pitcher, he only deals with the dirt-covered part of the field-- not a popular destination for the grass-loving geese, who tend to favor the outfield. Errigo said the team does not bother to clean the droppings off the field. “It’s not a big enough problem to concern ourselves with," he said. The outfielders on the team may beg to differ. The baseball team has the same approach to cleaning the droppings as the university maintenance staff. Amy Provenzano, the executive director of environmental stewardship at the university, said maintenance workers are only told to “brush it off walkways if in the path of travel,” but they do not go out of their way to clean up the droppings. But the pure volume of the geese excrement—remember, two pounds a day, per goose—makes this nearly impossible to do successfully. On any given day, the walkways near popular geese hangouts will be littered with droppings. “I do think the university could do a better job cleaning the stuff up, but the university could do a LOT of things better,” Fox wrote about the lack of feces removal. But he doesn’t think the policy should necessarily change. “I don't feel cleaning geese poop should necessarily be top priority on the list of things to fix,” he said. Droppings aside, students seemed eager to tell geese stories, even unsolicited ones. Shortly after confiding his wiffle-ball story, Hessel eagerly asked, “Do you want another story? Even if it doesn’t have to do with me?” Why not? “Well, it was rainy out, and the ground was all wet,” Hessel explained. “The geese were coming in for a landing on the grass and my friend was on the pathway. And one of the geese slid on the wet grass and crashed right into his leg and knocked him down.” The goose, of course, never apologized. And maybe that’s the thing about the geese: they believe the campus is theirs, and it is really the students who are intruding. Sure, students may pay thousands of dollars to come to Stony Brook, but the geese have probably been around since before the school was created a half-century ago. So, forgive them if sometimes they don’t seem to care about getting in the way. Friedman remembered an incident where the geese seemed to have taken this position. Last fall, he said, the geese stopped traffic for a few minutes while crossing Stadium Road, in front of Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium. “They were over by the road near the stadium and they decided to cross the road in a line, and they stopped all the traffic,” he said. An inconvenience for the waiting drivers—especially if they were already running late to class—but of no obvious concern to the geese. As Friedman said with a laugh, “This is their campus, not ours." |
