When you next stroll through the Arboretum on a sunny spring day, enjoying the ambiance of babbling waterfalls, lush green grass, and lover swans sailing in pairs across the pond…..look a little closer. You will find their wings just a little too white, their beaks just a tad too orange, and their sailing just a little too stationary.
You may start to question the greenness of the grass and ask yourself: Is the sky really that vibrantly blue? But fear not, only the swans are plastic.
These four additions to Dawes Pond — $99.99 per pair — hail from The Pond Guy’s warehouse in Armada, Michigan and arrived about a month ago to serve as sentries against a fouler fowl: Canadian geese.
Being flesh and feather rather than plastic and paint, geese and all their trappings — rather, droppings — are much less welcome to the picturesque pond.
According to Associate Professor of Biology Jeffrey Van Zant’s ornithological expertise, the geese, “make a real mess of the lake.”
“We are trying to keep geese out of the pond,” he said, “and swans are pretty territorial while they are nesting. So we hope that we can keep out or at least reduce the number of geese, using the swans as a deterrent.”
It is a simple and effective process, used in a variety of forms across the hunting and groundskeeping sphere. For example, spraying coyote urine on rodent traps keeps skunks — who are also prey for coyotes — from eating the rodents before they can be collected.
According to Angie Girdham, the campus horticulturalist in charge of ordering and maintaining the swans, geese will wise up to the trick if the swans remain stationary.
“Geese will become habitualized, like birds to a scarecrow,” Van Zant explained. “It might work for a while but if you don’t move it or change it somehow, they just realize that it is nothing.”
Every few weeks Girdham and her team plan to dredge up the weights and twine that keep the swans fixed eerily in place and move them around the perimeters of the small pond.
“We only need to keep them there while the geese are trying to nest,” Girdham added. “Once they nest we can take them down because the geese will no longer be interested.”
While the decoys are not always effective, Girdham said that so far they seem to be working well.
The Pond Guy’s swans are perhaps tad too realistic. They are deceiving not only Hillsdale’s geese, but Hillsdale’s humans.
Sunday March 14 at 2:45 p.m. they were involved in a security investigation. An elderly couple strolling through the Arboretum called Campus Security to come rescue what they thought was a dying swan floundering on its side in the pond. A security officer was dispatched to the pond, where he investigated and concluded that the swan was, in fact, plastic.
“They emailed me and asked if they could fix it because some lady thought it was a dead swan floating in the pond,” Van Zant recalled with a wry smile.
“It’s hilarious. I shared the email with everybody. They all got a big kick out of it.”
Van Zant, perhaps enjoying the pandemonium too much, has already begun plans for next year’s goose deterrent.
“I wonder too if, well, owls wont work with geese, but loons are pretty territorial when they are nesting,” Van Zant mused. “I don’t know if we could get plastic loons, but that might be an idea for next year. Now that we have started something, who knows, maybe we will have bald eagles by next year.”
So, next time you stroll through the Arboretum, I urge you to the engage in a Descartean examination of your surroundings. If the swans aren’t swans, then maybe the grass isn’t grass, and the trees aren’t trees. Perhaps you aren’t even in the Arb at all.
Junior Aidan Cyrus shared his experience of first realizing that the Arboretum’s beautiful new swans were no more than charlatans.
“It hurts. I thought, ‘Oh man, look at those swans. How did we get those to Hillsdale?’ And then when I realized they were fake it shattered my perceptions of reality,” Cyrus said. “I now believe that we are all just bunches of perceptions and life is meaningless. Thanks a lot, fake swans.”
Van Zant and Girdham never anticipated the existential quandaries they might be throwing unsuspecting strollers into when they first concocted their scheme.
“We were just trying to keep geese off the pond and it turned into a much bigger deal than we expected,” Van Zant said. “But we do enjoy the attention that the Arb gets.”