A semi-industrial, semi-suburban city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay, is once again hosting the unwanted and uninvited Canada Goose. In fact, every municipality in the area is dealing with the seasonal scourge. The Hills Golf Place in drought-stricken Hayward CA has been the temporary home to 134 unwanted geese for the past few weeks.
Littered with patches of yellowing, dying vegetation, the golf course’s few sections of lush green grass are now minefields of goose turds. Mindless middle-aged golfers track the grassy dropping all over the restaurant when they stop in for breaks, and the cleat cleaning small talk in the locker room is driving the employees insane.
Management at The Hills has tried humane goose deterrents such as shouting through a megaphone while driving speeding golf carts through the grazing flock and sneaking up on sleeping geese to blast them with leaf blowers, but nothing seems to scare the sod-gobblers away.
Unwilling to admit defeat, facility manager Red Bunker, has taken out all the stops and opened the course to local archers group Tekbro Bowman’s Society of Fremont in an effort to hunt down and extinguish the freeloading fowl. Bunker posted targeted ads on Facebook and very quickly booked excited archers to take aim at the feathered intruders.
By the end of the first week, it was clear to Bunker and everyone who’d gotten loose on the course that not only was this suburban setting an exciting place for a hunt, but the nature of the golf course lent gamification to the entire activity. “The boys had a great time of it. Not only was the hunt thrilling, but the rules of golf could be loosely applied to amplify the sport of it all,” recalled Bunker.
In the tradition of golf, the score is kept by how many arrows the sportsman shoots, with performance indicated by shooting the fewest arrows while still killing a minimum of two birds. Bonus points are earned and subtracted from the total score by achieving headshots, impaling an animal to a tree (or other vertical objects), and causing blood loss or splatter that drains into one of the course’s holes within 5 minutes of the shot.
The groundskeepers say that the fairways are quite a bloodbath at the end of each round, but there’s more catharsis about the blood than there ever was about the bird droppings.