It's almost like your limited slip differential with regard to dinner choice isn't there!!!:eek::D

I've wondered about that. Round here, specially around Oakland's Lake Merritt, Canadian geese are propagating like pigeons. Apparently, they never leave. People are wringing their hands, 'what to do, what to do?'

I'm thinking, 'cull the hell out of them and feed them to prisoners.'

We're going with standard wine and cider for Xmas dinner. No champagne until New Years maybe. I changed out our light fixtures a while back - no contractor grade stuff here!

As far as the wine goes we've been on a South African wine kick for the last month or so. We'd been drinking a lot of the Eastern Australian but gave the S.A. wines a try. Sebeka is one that seems to make a pretty good Shiraz blend for not too much money. Gonna stick with the Blantons bourbon for the aperitif.

I was kinda wondering about champagne at Christmas dinner myself. Who does that? If the story is true, and the guy telling it claims it was him and it was, apparently somebody does.

Champagne goes with everything, from starters to desert, so it's a no-brainer single wine choice. A fun way would be to start with the dry bruts and finish with a sweeter spumanti

I've just never been a huge Champagne fan. I'd rather drink wine or beer. I'm also not one to be too snooty about which wine is supposed to go with whatever. I have no problem with reds and chicken/pork or whites with beef. Kinda depends on what you're in the mood for. I think I might go with some nice ciders for New Years though. they're fizzy and taste a lot better than most champagnes - I think.

In Rockland County, NY (30 miles North of NYC) they have a tremendous goose problem. The winters are mild enough so they there is usually some open water and the morons ,er I mean people feed them all winter. SO now they have 10000 geese in a couple parks. Of course there is no hunting allowed as the are ia pretty built up. The county government came up with a brilliant plan. Round them up, and feed them to the homeless and other poor people. Well PETA got a hold of this idea and you know what they did? They waited until the geese were rounded up and then fed them mercury laden grain! This made them inedible and foiled the plan of the county to use the meat. The county went ahead and killed the geese (much to PETA's SHOCK) but simply stuck all the meat in a landfill...

Moral of the story is:

If you want to use these flying rats for something useful, don't let PETA know about it.

I have hated Canadian Geese for a long time. I know that the goose in our fridge is a white domestic goose and is not a Canadian Goose, but I love the idea of eating one of them!

Jeez, there's kindness to animals for you -- feeding them mercury.

All the geese that come through here limit themselves to hanging out on the Navy Base, not in town. They thrash all the lawns on their way to wherever they go. It looks like the lawns been chewed up with a giant de-thatcher when they're done. Of course, you can't hunt them on base unless the CO says you can and ever since the burro imbroglio of a few years back they're not too keen to allow hunting. It tends to offend the delicate California sensibilities.

those pita nuts are just so goofy! I have talked to folks who think hunting deer is kindof equal to going out in a field and shooting a cow. Having hunted deer myself, they are very sneaky bastards who are about impossible to get a shot at.

A friend has swans and he has a pond out in the boonies. He says if you have a pair of swans you will NOT have any canadians hanging around. The swans will run them off. Course they will run humans off too if they get too close while nesting.

A swan can't kill (at least I don't think so) you but they can make you reallly sorry you got too close to them.

Tom W

^^Swans are nasty SOBs. They're pretty to look at from afar but God help you if you get close and piss them off (unless you have a shotgun). We used to try and bait them from the little flat boats on the lake. They'd get pretty ticked and give a good chase - actually, they'd catch us pretty easily. I can understand the gooses wanting to stay away.

I doubt the mercury would have hurt the geese - it was meant to dissuade the people from eating them. Sort of like spiking a tree. I think it was a good call to cull them anyway. At least they'd make some decent fertilizer for Xmas trees or something.

C'mon dude, I knew it was meant to make it unfit for human consumption. :mad: ;)

But, I'm surprised it wouldn't have at least some ill effect on the birds.

That's why for some species of geese the daily bag limit is 20! The snow geese are called "Tundra Maggots" because of their impact on the Canadian and Alaskan tundra. The expansion of rice fields in AR, TX, LA over the past 30 years has provided food for the transient birds. Establishment and expansion of national wildlife refuges, CRP and WRP contracts and no-till farming have greatly expanded the food, habitat and over-wintering of migratory waterfowl. They return to Canada fat and ready to breed and then they get in huge concentrated flocks that strip the tundra bare of vegetation -- it can take hundreds of years for tundra to re-grow naturally.

Some likely outcomes of concentrating populations is increase in aggressive behavior, over-utilization of resources, increases in aberrant behavior, and increases in parasites and diseases. It applies to humans, too.

B

Similar patterns on all N. American flyways. I am most familiar with the Mississippi flyway.