Editor’s note: This week, Dropping In received a strange letter from a (purported) goose seemingly upset by recent Bulletin coverage about public safety and geese and humans not always getting along. It described Bend’s long “crusade against geese,” which includes harassment with lasers and, in 2010, the gassing of 109 of the large birds. As someone prone to gibberish himself, columnist David Jasper has attempted to transcribe the letter. Take a gander at goose logic, such as it were.

Honk honk, Dropping In:

You people again.

I can’t count, but it seems like every few seasons, human beaks start flapping in your neck of the backwoods when we show up on your frigging lawns and do what geese do: loiter around, eat our fill, poop it out, rinse, repeat.

What a buncha honking goslings! I thought you rugged individual Western types were all about bootstrap this and live and let live that. When did “Don’t tread on me” turn into “Don’t trample on my lawn”?

Permit me to come to your emotional fescue, I mean, rescue.

You need to wake up and smell the junipers. Need I remind you all that you live in the High Desert?

Y’all have greened things up so much, it’s hard to be sure about the desert part, but you MUST be high: You plant all that delicious Kentucky bluegrass, which is like ringing a dinner bell to us, then piss and moan when we show up and demand seconds, thirds, fourths and fifths. It’s what we do! You could have gone native, Xeroxscaped or whatever you call it, but no. You want it to look like March at Augusta National (the 13th hole is on my bucket list), but then you dare to complain because the grass we eat moves through our bowels like, well, s–-t through a goose. Complaining about our presence is just plain rich, unlike your soil when left to its own devices.

And don’t get me started on Mirror Pond — you’re the ones who created a damned pond and a park out of a stretch of what used to be wild river. Sure, yeah, the stakeholders, whatever the heck those are, don’t want it, but trust me. When viewed from above — ha ha, we can fly and you can’t, nanny nanny boo boo! — one can see that human hubris is no match for time and hydraulic forces, but what would I know? I’m just a bird!

Yet I do know a thing or two about grass. When it comes to the green stuff, we geese take what we see as ours. Just like humans do with, well, just about everything else on God’s GREEN earth. Yeesh.

So you try to scare us off, as if dudes with dogs can hold their own against a mighty gaggle like mine. You’ve pointed lasers at us like we’re George Costanza, and even fed us ”birth control,” aka chemical castration. Listen: I want my boys to swim, yet you try to control us like so many dumb-esticated dogs and cats. (Shout out to ferals. Respect, y’all.)

If you humans knew what was good for you — and based on your continued use of Roundup, I doubt it — you would back the flock off. Did you know our bites can bruise, and getting repeatedly hit by our flapping wings can even break limbs? (Yours.) I recently searched “Can geese …” on your Gaggle — I mean, Google — and the first suggestion after “Can geese” was “kill you?”

I mean, granted, we can be scary, but we’re just trying to keep our young safe and get some more delicious grass in our tummies. Other than my being grace on two webbed feet and your inability to fly, are we really so different, you and I?

It’s tough to broker peace once human feathers get ruffled, but believe me and Alfred Hitchcock: You don’t want to go to war with birds. Imagine my kind united with crows — talk about smart cookies! Bluejays are obnoxious as all get out, which is saying something coming from a goose, but you don’t want to scrap with one or two of them. Now imagine those cranky cusses in a swarm.

One thing is for sure. We ain’t gonna change. That’s why “A wild goose never laid a tame egg” is a saying.

We implore you to stop your wild goose chases and chill out. I get that our poop is gross, but we don’t have flush toilets, yet. Just consider it free fertilizer.

At the very least, the more moronic members of your species should heed Article 4.1 of Bend Park & Recreation District’s rules and stop feeding bread to waterfowl when they’re visiting Drake Park!

Peace,

Quentin Gandertino

P.S. Have fun with global warming, desert dwellers! When the feces hit the fan, me and the boys will just fly north, where the grass is greener. We are Canada geese after all. Talk about a moveable feast! Honk honk!