Griselda has a cousin down the coast who got rounded up and kept in a holding pen for a while, until some human came and took her to a little farm with a pond. Griselda’s cousin says she likes it there, but I’m thinking, a farm? Doesn’t sound like a safe place to me. 

They’re after us because we shit too much. They meet for hours to talk about our dung: how slippery it is, how green and smelly, and how we leave it in all the wrong places.

We can’t help any of that.

There was a rally in my park last month. A man with a bullhorn was shouting things like, “One ten-pound goose produces up to three pounds of excrement per day. This creates unsanitary conditions in our water, on our shores, and in our parks!”

Someone in the crowd shook his fist and screamed, “Yeah, and on my sidewalk!”

A woman in red shorts yelled, “So what? If I shit on your driveway, are you going to kill me, too?” 

The man with the bullhorn got going again. “There are twenty-six thousand in the Seattle area. If we reduce their population by fifteen percent, we’ll reduce the total volume of droppings by nearly four million pounds.”

“How many geese is fifteen percent?” asked a bearded man with a notebook.

“Thirty-five hundred,” the bullhorn blared. 

The bearded man wrote this down. Then all of the humans started yelling at once, so I got out of there.

They’ve been doing things to our eggs. Griselda says that a friend of hers found a human shaking her eggs a few months ago. Her friend took a bite out of his thigh, but it didn’t do any good—none of the eggs ever hatched. I wouldn’t lay any more, if I could help it, but this is one of those things I can’t control.

I keep telling everyone we should migrate soon, but nobody else wants to go. They say the humans are noisy and slow, that we can always fly out at the last minute if we have to. And it’s true that we can always hear their dogs from a mile off.

But, still. 

Last week there were people in my park waving signs that said “Gas the geese!” Pretty soon some other people came and yelled at those people. There was some shoving, and then one of those cars with the whirling lights drove up and everyone left.

The next day a white van rolled in and two men got out of it. There weren’t any dogs. The men scattered chunks of bread around on the grass and stood there, smoking cigarettes, pretending not to watch us. I didn’t eat the bread, but lots of other geese did, and they all fell asleep. The men piled the sleeping geese into the van and drove away.

I hope they were taking them to that farm where Griselda’s cousin lives.

This morning I walked down to the pond, and I heard a woman tell her friend that I was a lovely bird. 

“Yes,” her friend said. “I can enjoy them now that there aren’t so many. No more dung in the wheels of my baby’s stroller.”

It’s been pretty quiet around here for the last few days. I hope my friends didn’t migrate without me. But I know Griselda would never do that.

I wonder where Griselda is.

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