Athletic director Kate Cassidy pulls into the school parking lot early in the morning when she gets a text on her phone from the head field hockey coach Maggie Darby. When Cassidy reads it, she can’t help but laugh at the message telling her that there is a coyote on the field.
The life-sized cardboard cut-outs of animals were placed on the field the second week of August in an attempt to scare the geese away.
“The cut-outs are on baseball, softball, the practice fields, and the band area,” Cassidy said. She put them there in response to the geese, which she describes as “a stubborn bird that once they find a spot they like, they don’t like to move out of the way.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time the school has had an issue with the geese. Cassidy even said that assistant athletic director Stephen McNamara brought in his dog to try and scare the geese away. “It worked for a little while, but then they came back,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy had read that purple Kool-Aid would help. When it didn’t work, they tried the cut-outs instead. “We try to move them around, because the geese will start coming back if we don’t move them around,” Cassidy commented.
Cassidy had mentioned that they are planning on keeping the cut-outs all fall, until they stop seeing the geese.
“They haven’t interacted with anyone from what I’ve seen,” sophomore Avery Bennet said. As a member of color guard, Bennet frequently spends time on the field. “People chase them or swing their flags at them to be funny, but they don’t really react.”
Bennet mentioned that the cut-outs seemed to be working pretty great, with the exception of a group of geese that Bennet said might have figured out the cut-outs aren’t real.
But the main problem of the geese being on the field, is what they leave behind.
“It was annoying to have to watch out for where we placed equipment like flags on the field to make sure we didn’t put them on goose droppings,” junior Amelia Cunnington on color guard said.
With the cut-outs working fairly well, it’s highly likely you may see a coyote or owl sitting in the school fields. Hopefully, you won’t see many geese.
