Harbor Center goose deterrent sparks outcry
Coeur d'Alene Press | UPDATED 13 years, 8 months AGO
Harbor Center geese
<p>This photo, pulled from the Kootenai Environmental Alliance's website, kealliance.org, shows spikes installed outside the University of Idaho's Harbor Center building in Coeur d'Alene. They were put there to keep geese from nesting there, but resulted in injuries to persistent geese.</p>
A spiked deterrent for nesting geese at the University of Idaho at Coeur d'Alene's Harbor Center prompted a flood of calls to the Kootenai Evironmental Alliance last week.
On the group's website, they report:
"According to our callers, at least three geese were severely injured while trying to nest on the beams that cross the waterside front of the University of Idaho Coeur d’Alene campus building. It turns out that to deter the geese from nesting – as they have in previous years — a maintenance crew had installed, literally, a bed of 5-inch nails.
Horrified witnesses in the building watched the geese struggling to make a nest while getting punctured by the nails. The geese were completely covered in blood and could not understand their peril as this had been their nesting area for years."
KEA contacted Idaho Fish & Game and Charles Buck, Associate Vice President and the university's chief executive in Coeur d'Alene, and the environmental group reports that the university has agreed to remove the "bed of nails" on Monday.