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Don’t lecture me about the great outdoors: I love them. For two years of my adult life, I lived in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, smack dab in the middle-of-nowhere, Montana. Our canyon had more grizzly bears roaming around than it did people. Before that, I spent most of my childhood building forts, catching tadpoles and counting meteorites in northeastern Pennsylvania. But somewhere along the way, I encountered the menacing side of Mother Nature. It wasn’t the time that a deer tried to sniff my ass while I was taking a shit on a backpacking trip, nor was it the time a mole bit my hand after I tried to rescue it from a predatory housecat. No, my issues with Mother Nature began with an otherwise innocent, if not stupid animal: the Canada Goose. In 1992, the local population of Canada Geese closed our lake because they had been treating it as a personal latrine. Disgusted that my favourite swimming hole was ruined by some overweight waterbirds, I took it upon myself to rectify the situation by stalking them in my family’s paddleboat. Our lake was no longer safe and I, travelling at a speedy two kilometres per hour, was the only one who could restore the natural order. This event marked the beginning of a series of avian encounters that placed specific birds on a condemnatory list and moved these birds to a place beyond redemption.
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