Geese will be geese

We've had a Canada goose saga here this nesting season. The geese, and the inevitable problems they bring with them, arrived a few weeks ago. But this year's situation was worse than I expected. Why in the world would geese relieve themselves on the foot mat at our back door? They peer in the door window, too.

There is no (legal) solution, I know. Well, maybe we could buy a dog, but that has its own problems.

Our back yard seems to be a goose magnet. There's a swamp behind our house, with one end touching our yard. The effect is sort of pond-like, open water, if you ignore the duckweed.

A pair of geese arrived as soon as the ice was gone. They nested. One or both of them -- they look a lot alike -- began incubation. Eight days later, they disappeared for 48 hours, a stretch that included two nights during when the temp dropped to 40 degrees.

The eggs were assumed to have lost viability. I got rid of them.

Two geese returned. The parent geese? Who knows. As I said, they look a lot alike. These geese hung around. Then they went away. Next thing we knew, two pairs of adults with babies showed up. One pair had a single gosling, the other had five. Whose geese were these? Where did they nest? Why didn't they stay there?

Long-term guests

The geese, I assume, will leave when they're mature enough to fly. In my view, the young birds are growing very, very slowly, not that I want them to eat more. Heaven forbid! The dog solution looks better and better each time I go out that door.

We also have a family of hooded mergansers that might or might not have hatched in one of our wood duck boxes. They're really cute, and they hardly ever come onto the lawn. Then, there's the wood duck family, also perhaps yard nesters. Thankfully, they also have good toilet manners.

As of June 7, there was yet one wood duck hen to finish incubation here. She was sitting on 22 eggs, some of them a gift from another hen. Wood ducks do that.

So, we're hosting two goose families, one merganser family, and soon to be two wood duck families. This is a bumper crop for us.

This past winter, we had three wild turkeys in the yard. Then two, then one, then that survivor's feathers spread across the yard one morning. Before their demise, though, those birds behaved just like the geese, regarding our door and door mat. Very strange.

The geese dominate, though. We watch them from our dining-room windows, and from the deck, and far too often up close and very personal at the back door.