Re: “Harvest the geese to feed the homeless” (Letters, Aug. 22)
Dear tourists, we love Nelson too! Many of us live here year-round but we also have family who fly up every summer to enjoy the town.
After years of living in Nelson, we only have one question, one thing we don’t understand.
The tourists! So many tourists!
Lakeside’s athletic fields are covered in tourists. The beach is covered in tourists. The grass area by the playground where we go to flock is covered in tourists.
Swimming in the lake, marching across the grass, or having a honk fest while continuously having to avoid tourists is not normal. As my gosling, Ryan, says, “It’s all so distracting.”
We see tourist kids kicking soccer balls at us, off-leash tourist dogs flushing us into the water, tourists on bicycles breaking up our goose parade as we regally waddle from the lake to the soccer fields. Why don’t the residents of Nelson demand a permanent clean up?
A local resident told us that tourists are just too difficult to chase off so the city gave up trying. If that’s true, that’s the lamest excuse from a city hall anywhere.
The same resident also told us about an interesting solution to the problem. Here it is: Nelson has a bear population that lacks access to food. Bears regularly wander into the city and start causing havoc in garbages and fruit trees. If you harvest all the tourists that enter Lakeside Park, you can feed them to the bears and eliminate the tourist problem.
Geese are natural politicians and we all agree this is an easy win-win. Let’s not kill any birds with any stones! Feed the bears and clean up the tourist problem in the city’s best park.
Without feather ado, goose-riddance to you!
The Lakeside Park Geese