DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 1:31 p.m. January 27, 2009
Geese on Buckhead condo’s eviction list
15-year lake residents Bertie and Bowie, plus 14 more birds, may need new home
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The battle of the Buckhead geese is heating up, and everyone is squawking.
On one side are bird lovers who feed the cackling flock on the shores of the pond at Cross Creek, a Buckhead condo complex. Opposite them are folks who’d love to see the geese — and what they leave behind —- gone.
MARK DAVIS / mdavis@ajc.com
Cross Creek resident Marielle Shehyn feeds the geese (and the occasional duck) every day. She wants them to stay at the Buckhead condo.
In the middle are 16 members of the Anser species — white geese, gray geese, geese with black highlights. Winged bums, they live for the next handout.
But those handouts may dry up if the wishes of a committee at the condo complex are carried out. Bertie, Bowie and their 14 offspring, the committee recently agreed, have overstayed their welcome.
That kind of talk makes Marielle Shehyn hissing mad.
“Whonk!” she called Monday morning. Across the lake, a flock of geese looked up, necks arched like question marks. “Whonk-whonk!”
The birds took off. They looked like bombers zeroing in on a target. That target: a 3-pound bag of cracked corn Shehyn held. The birds landed on bright-orange feet. They managed to waddle and run at the same time.
She tossed a handful of yellow corn on the grass, stiff and brown in winter. The geese bent and gobbled, bent and gobbled. A couple of mallards strolled in for a closer look. In the distance, oblivious to the gluttony on shore, stood a great blue heron.
Shehyn smiled. “They’re my pets,” said Shehyn, a real estate agent who’s lived at the complex 26 years. “We’re not going to let them take them.”
“Them” is Cross Creek’s community affairs committee. The panel last Thursday said folks had had enough of, well…
“Excretions,” said Cross Creek general manager Dan Thron. “It was very distracting to patrons of our restaurant as well as to the golfers.”
With Thron’s encouragement, the committee voted for avian fans to come up with a plan to find new homes for the geese — no exceptions, not even for 15-year lake residents Bertie and Bowie. In the world of Cross Creek geese, they are like Abraham and Sarah: They begat a nation.
The committee, goose fans say, has a point. Sixteen geese can easily turn into 32, or more. And, while they delight in watching goslings paddling across the lake, folks are realistic. “Puppies are cute, too,” said Shehyn. “But they turn into dogs.”
They propose finding homes for nine which were born on Mother’s Day last year. The remaining seven, said goose fan Bonnie Woods, ought to stay.
“We almost have a nature preserve here,” said Woods, a state employee.
Thron is sympathetic. In 25 years of managing complexes, Thron said he’s dealt with all sorts of wild nuisances. Deer. Wild hogs, which can tear up a golf course more effectively than an army of duffers. “They’re bad,” Thron said.
But geese, he said, are problems, too. In the past, the condo association hired a guy who relocated about 60 Canada geese that had turned golf course fairways into smelly mine fields. And, last October, Thron employed someone to take away the 16. Workers herded the geese into a truck that was bound for a wildlife area in Alabama. An hour later, it turned around. The committee, Thron discovered, had not voted to oust the honkers.
“They were taken by mistake,” he said.
Not so this time. If they’re not all gone, “I’ll have another [goose] problem next year,” he said. Thron said he would like the goose-lovers to give him a plan by February at the earliest.
Shehyn, meantime, said she plans to talk to others who want Bertie & Co. to remain. Maybe they can work out a compromise with their opponents?
Woods was more pragmatic. If the birds get the bum’s rush, “I guess we’ll consider rather or not to get more geese.”
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