Habs 0 – Hunters 1
Ahhh. Finally a warm south wind. The sun is out and birds are chirping. The sounds of nature fill the air, streams dash through the streets… and into my back yard. What? I check to see if my little scrap shack is okay to work in only to find that water from today’s six-hour meltdown had created a sizeable pond. A nice looking pond too. I should have put up some decoys just to see if they would work on the now legendary urban goose.
Urbanus anser capitalia, the name for the newly labelled Canada goose in quick Latin, resides in town parks, along riversides, or on local golf courses. Basically, any place with grass is the home of the urban goose. In this environment, the goose is considered a pest, right up there with crows and seagulls. Seagulls, however, have a hefty fine attached if you happened to kill one, unlike the urban goose, whose flesh is considered incredibly scrumptious to our people.
The urban goose means business. No hillbilly fowl here. In fact, the urban goose is so smart he can populate entire farms and devastate their cornfields; thereby increasing the price of popcorn at concession stands in every movie theatre in North America. Of course, this doesn’t really affect us, as much as we like to watch movies on Netflix.
This year the number of urban hunters will most likely be staying out all day feeling that primal urge to provide food for their loved ones. This urge has overridden their hockey obsessions, turning this goose season into a highly competitive quest for the fabled goose. If you analyze the amount of time sacrificed to watching hockey over hunting geese, you can probably correlate the number of flock that flew by unscathed to the decrease in the annual catch.
This year will promise more time for hunting without interruption and thus, increase the chances of being at the blind when they fly in. Of course, bragging aside, the actual number of shots fired versus the number of missed shots will ensure that this will be a quiet year for the aiming impaired. Yes, the inept 2016 Habs have helped create environmental havoc.
Today, there is no hiding from the brazen urban goose, whose wild side is still retained in their DNA over the cosmopolitan transformation of North America. They fiercely defend their treasured parks and territories from what they consider to be pests – humans. Yes, the human is now the goose’s pest. How dare they take over my lakes and rivers and replace it with artificial fountains and stinky waterholes they like to swim in.
Back in the day, before humans made life intolerable for all species, the water fowl and birds of the world flew in flocks so large they blocked the sun for days. T poles would be erected and the birds would fall to the ground unconscious or dead after smashing into them. It was just a matter of picking up the harvest before it got too high to reach. Those days are long gone.
After the gun was introduced, over-harvesting decimated the great flocks. Fortunately, the north was spared since natural resources were too expensive to access. That’s until the large dams marred the landscape with incredible amounts of water, flooding the lands of the geese and changing enough of the environment to affect the natural food source of the wild Canada goose, altering annual flight paths that our ancestors depended on century after century. The wild goose has become urbanized to the extent that we are now migrating south to get our annual harvest. Oh my, how times have changed.