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Canada Invades Illinois! (Ok, just the geese)

© Sharon Wren

(Rooters) A gang of renegade Canada geese briefly held a local family hostage in their home this morning. Readers may be familiar with these geese, as artificial ones are often found in yards as ornaments or wind socks. The geese issued no demands and departed after about an hour. Police are investigating this matter and have issued no warrants.

Saturday mornings are a bad time for me to begin with. My beloved can somehow sleep through both a baby who wants to party at the crack of 6 a.m. and a herd of dachshunds who will surely perish if they stay in their kennels another second. Not me. The minute the whining begins, either from baby or dogs, my eyeballs snap open like window shades and I can pretty much kiss off getting any more sleep.

On this particular Saturday, it was the baby who woke me up, so I got up to make him a bottle, in the hopes of copping a little more sleep. As I filled the bottle with water, I looked out the kitchen window and saw about 20 Canada geese in our front yard. I figured they were part of the usual crew that hangs out down by the river, and they were in the mood to explore. On the way to Logan's room with the bottle, I looked out the living room window and there were at least 50 more in the back yard! I ran from window to window and sure enough, we were surrounded by dozens of geese. They looked like they were casing the joint. I bounced into our bedroom and woke my husband. "Honey, we're surrounded by geese!" He gave me the Look of Death, but staggered out of bed and looked out the living room window. "Hey, look at all the geese!" DUH!

It was pretty cool to watch them for a while. You know - the whole "beauty of nature", Discovery Channel type of thing. But they kept coming. And coming. Waves of geese were coming in from the river, like an army landing. It was starting to look like an invasion! I was waiting for Dudley Doright to come to the door to discuss the terms of our surrender. The geese were wandering through my rosebushes, pecking around the yard and planting goose "landmines", if you get my drift. I was worried about letting the dogs out because they were greatly outnumbered and I didn't want to see the feathers and the fur fly (literally!).