The swimming beach at Mint Springs Park is enclosed with
a tall, black, vinyl-clad chain link fence.
Canada Geese, who live in the park day and night during the school year,
only visit the park at nighttime in the summer.
The pond is open for swimming during summer days. Cars and trucks litter the parking lot. The noise of children and teens enjoying
themselves fills the air.
A pleasure of dusk at the park is the sound of a gaggle of geese coming in for a landing on the
pond. With hysterical hoarse honks and
much back feathering about 25 geese land on the pond; they swim directly to the
beach. Earlier, on spring evenings, they
spent time on the dam, pecking in the grass, or over by the picnic tables near Shelter
One before they swim to their nighttime beach.
Canada Geese are not tidy; the geese defecate everywhere they land.
At night the tall chain link fence gives the geese
protection. The park is rife with predators.
Sometimes at night a few coyotes howl.
Bears, raccoons, hawks, and foxes visit after hours. Occasionally a skunk perfumes the air.
While many of the geese sleep sound in the beach
enclosure, a few keep their necks erect scanning the surrounding park for
threats. These sentinel geese detect enemies
digging under the fence. One night recently, Ox waited for me as I walked
around the pond. It was almost dark when
I returned to his picnic table. He said “Come, I want to show you something”. The light had almost gone. I could barely make out the form he pointed
out. Beside one of the lifeguard stands
I saw what looked like a moth-eaten wolf, lowered head pointed at the herd of
geese. The wolf didn’t move. The geese didn’t move. The sentinel geese
didn’t more, and, oddly, didn’t even utter.
The
next evening the wolf mystery was partly solved. In the earlier evening light, the wolf, now
lying on its side under the lifeguard stand, was clearly a rubber or plastic
wolf. My first hypothesis was that a
lifeguard, clowning, wore the wolf on his head to amuse the children.The evening after that there were two wolves at the beach, each lying under a lifeguard stand. I took pictures.
We drove to the park later than usual one night. We stood on the footbridge over a side pond ringed with young willows and watched as turtles surfaced their heads; when they spotted us, they sank into the murk leaving concentric rings in the water. A rangy woman came up to us. She said that she often came up here in the evenings to swim. She talked to the life guards one evening. They were worried, she said, about the pond as a source of disease. After a day at work in the sun a couple of them felt tired and had headaches. They feared that the geese might be a source of infection. Suddenly the wolves made sense. Hypothesis two is that the wolves are intended as goose repellents.
Obviously, as the goose flock sleeps under the wolves' noses, the wolves did not immediately work as goose repellents. However, for the last two nights we have arrived at dusk and stayed until past dark, and the goose flock has not shown up.
For the last two weeks, all but one of the gates onto the beach has been locked with chains and padlocks. The first time we noticed it, one gate had an unsecured chain wrapped around it. After that first night the chain wasn’t even there. I have a lawless streak and had a desire to surprise the lifeguards. Last night, as Ox stood watch, I opened the gate, took each wolf from under its lifeguard stand, and posed the wolves on the stands. I felt a surge of scofflaw joy as I did this. Ox wiped my prints off the gate as we left. You see before you a 77 year-old woman turning to the dark side and a couple of wolves coming out from the shadows.
