The other night, as we were sitting around watching a scary movie, I paused the movie and asked my family in a low, serious voice: “Does anyone else feel like we’re being watched?”

My family looked puzzled and, to be honest, a bit freaked out. I looked pointedly at the window behind our TV, and it became apparent to everyone that we were, indeed, being watched. The geese were watching us with their beady eyes, fully aware that all the good food comes from those humans sitting so close, yet so far, behind a pane of double glazed glass.

The geese have become pests. They hang around the front door, waiting for us, screeching for us to feed them. The dog is terrified of them and won’t go out the front door where they are keeping guard. And, of course, they poo everywhere, especially at the front door.

Something had to be done. We could get rid of the geese- no more poo, no more screeching, front door safe for humans and dogs once more. But the whole reason we got the geese was to keep the grass mowed. If we got rid of the geese, we would need to buy a ride-on lawnmower.

Our other option was to build a fence, outlining a yard which we could keep safe from geese and maybe even the marauding possums. We decided on the second option.

Building fences can be an expensive venture, and we have so many other projects to spend our money on, so we started brainstorming cheap fence ideas. We have a LOT of immature eucalypts on our property, so we decided we could build a stick fence for almost no outlay at all.

This involved sawing down the eucalypts, sawing the crown of the trees and any branches, debarking the tree if necessary, then nail-gunning the tree to our fence structure.

It’s actually a lot more time-consuming that we thought it would be.  And we’re not really sure if the effect is a little too Robinson-Crusoe-shipwrecked-on-an-island.

But for the time being, it is doing what it is meant to do.  We have a wonderful, goose-free zone.  And a nice side effect is that the area we have fenced just feels so much easier to landscape.  We can tame just a little bit of the wilderness and let everything outside the fence do its own thing.

Yesterday, five more geese walked up our driveway to hang out on the property.  Looks like we built the fence just in time.