Brian, the nets will drop early, before the sun clears the tree line. The geese cannot fly when they are pinned. They will be loaded into a trailer and sealed in the dark. The carbon monoxide will enter their lungs. Jack Hollum, who sits on your board and voted against this, told a reporter what comes next. The geese will hold their breath. They can hold it for forty-five minutes. Your coffee reaches your kitchen table minutes later. The swallow that morning will carry the weight of what happened in the dark. You will not feel it go down.
Brian, hear what your board has set in motion. Edgewater surrounds a 140-acre man-made lake called Lady Ann Lake, and your homeowners association voted to kill 226 Canada geese there by carbon monoxide gassing. Your board said the geese have affected the lake’s quality, public health, trails, common areas, and resident safety. Those are clean words. They sit on the page the way a press release sits on a desk — neat, clipped, committed to nothing that bleeds.
The same method was used in 2020. A new flock arrived, because the man-made lake that draws them did not close. The water is still there. The grass is still there. The absence of predators is still there. Every condition that brought the first flock brings the second. Your board knows this. The documentation is in your own minutes. You killed them, and the conditions you killed them for produced replacements, and now you are killing again. The same federal apparatus that gave Alaska wildlife agents the right to shoot bears from helicopters so caribou might live has now handed a man-made lake the right to asphyxiate geese because their existence is inconvenient. Federal permit. Federal subcontractor. Federal language. The machinery is the same. Only the target changes.
The geese are federally protected. The USDA gave you a permit anyway. Board member Hollum, who is on your board, who sits at the same table and reads the same minutes and signs the same checks, told a reporter what the subcontractor does. “They shoot nets over the flocks of geese, capture as many as they can, they put them in a trailer, and gas them to death.” He voted no. He is telling anyone who will listen what your clean words conceal.
Resident Natalie Tidwell told WAFF 48 she has never had issues with aggression or illness from the geese. “I can’t say that it’s a problem that warrants lethal measures,” she said. Dozens of residents protested. David Field started a petition on Change.org. Your own people are telling you this is wrong, and your board is not listening.
The killing is not a solution. The killing is a ritual. The first time was cruelty disguised as necessity. The second time — knowing what you know, reading what you have read, hearing Hollum tell you what forty-five minutes feels like in a sealed trailer — the second time is cruelty chosen for its own sake. The machinery exists. The permit exists. The subcontractor exists. And so the killing continues, because the machinery is already built and the people who built it have not been asked to sit inside it.
Edgewater is a man-made neighborhood surrounding a man-made lake. The geese did not break into a human space. The humans built a lake in the geese’s flyway and moved in beside it. The geese came because the water was there and the grass was there and nothing hunted them, and they did what every living thing does when the conditions are right: they multiplied. The HOA calls this an infestation. A more honest word would be arrival.
You could use horns. You could relocate them. You could let the grass grow taller at the water’s edge, which geese dislike. You could accept that living beside a lake means living beside the things a lake draws, the way living beside a forest means living beside foxes and the way living beside a field means living beside the wind. But your board chose the gas chamber. Your board chose the nets. Your board chose the forty-five minutes in the dark. You chose it knowing that the last time it did not work, knowing that the conditions would bring the next flock, knowing that the killing would need to be repeated, and accepting the repetition as the point.
Look at the birds of the air, Jesus said. Your Father feeds them. Matthew 6:26
The lake is still there. The grass is still there. The birds will come back. They do not know what happened to the flock that came before them. They land on the water because it is water and they are birds. The Father feeds them, and the board gasses them, and the two truths occupy the same 140 acres. The geese will not read the HOA’s statement about sustainable levels and documented impacts. They will land where the water is. And the nets will fall again, because the machinery is already built.
Mary Magdalena