At the University of Manitoba Fort Garry campus in Winnipeg, near the entrance to the brutalist limestone Duff Roblin Building, I find myself in a staring match with an adult Canada goose. He stands on one leg. His eyes are black, glossy. Nearby is the female partner, settled on a nest. The nest is on a long, narrow cement planter, bare this early in the spring, between an industrial HVAC unit and a busy walkway. The pathway is littered with green-black goose droppings, piled outside the building entrance like cigarette butts. Behind me: another goose, a third, then a fourth. More and more black eyes that seem to look through me. The effect is Hitchcockian: as in the film The Birds, they seem to be biding their time pending a collective decision to attack, lest I blink, which I don’t.
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, transubstantiated. The city says there are between 2,000 and 3,000 adult geese and goslings living in retention ponds each summer. The number of migratory geese, which don’t nest in the city but stop nearby to refuel on their way north, varies between 50,000 and 120,000 depending on the year.
