Ell(en) Chen 2025

When students, staff, and faculty returned to the Island this year, many certainly expressed amazement at an apparent summertime miracle—I know I did: Two beautiful, snow-white swans had moved into the Cow Pond.
Our Cow Pond? The (funnily) cow-less, muddy, flooding-prone, geese-infested pool which is most commonly referenced around campus as a punishment device for underclassmen? And emphasis on geese-infested: at least a total of one thousand must make the Cow Pond a pitstop on their migration journey north, and another thousand when they return south. They come in waves, leaving nothing behind but chewed up grass, stray feathers, and poop. According to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, a Canada Goose can produce three pounds of poop per day. Everytime the geese descend, they rain refuse.
Or rather, when they descended. These days, there’s hardly a honk around the Cow Pond. Instead, the swans float gracefully upon the silent waters of the Cow Pond. How fortunate are we, that such rare and beautiful creatures chose to make our Pond their home, and bless us with their graceful presence? What an impossibility, what a miracle!
Swans in our Cow Pond? Of course it was too good to be true.
Certainly, just as community-members experienced an initial moment of wonder at the appearance of the swans, they later received notice that the waterfowl were, in fact, false. This revelation may have prompted feelings of confusion, disappointment, betrayal, rage, or even despair. Personally, my reaction tended towards the extreme side, and it involved angrily marching down to the Cow Pond to confirm that, yes, the swans which I deludedly believed were real and living were actually hollow plastic floats—and then deciding to write an Op-ed for the Log to process my feelings.
Mr. Lance Hall, the Director of the Physical Plant, did not respond to my request to interview on exactly how and why the swans were installed. However, a quick online search led me to deduce that these swans are anti-geese decoys. Swans are very territorial and aggressive, and compete with geese for habitat and resources, so a couple of swan decoys can keep the pesky pests away and out of the water. The disappearance of geese around the Meadows clearly shows that these decoys are very effective. Too effective, in fact, as they have fooled a good majority of an institute dedicated to education of the highest quality along with the geese.
Today we live on a thankfully geese-less campus, yet I can’t help but feel uneasy every time I look at the Cow Pond. For an instant, I think that the swans are real, before I correct myself. Every time I look, I am reminded of how I was deceived. Perhaps some readers feel the same.
Or perhaps not. The swans may be a source of relief for Physical Plant workers who no longer need to fix geese-ruined grass, soccer players who no longer need to wade through poop to get to practice, or people who just plain hate Canadian Geese. The swans are a convenient and practical solution to the geese problem.
Yet I say, remove the swans. Reject false beauty. Reject manipulation of nature. Reject deception. Embrace the geese and all they entail. Face the noisy, putrid goose and know that it is living and real, rather than shelter yourself with a demure, hollow, puppet. The fact that we humans were fooled by the swan decoys proves that we may be no better than geese—so perhaps we ought to live in the company of geese.