Today is my birthday...

So what has that headline got to do with what I am about to write? Absolutely nothing.

We live on a lake that has beautiful geese in abundance. But beautiful geese do not make for a beautiful yard... unless you are a goose poop affecionado. So I bought four incredibly life-like all- weather coyote cutouts and placed them in the yard. Cost: $65 plus shipping and handling.

How real are they? Well, in Ontario (where they really know geese) a woman saw one of the cutouts set up in a parking lot to scare them away. She was jogging by and heard a 'bark.' She immediately called 9-1-1 to report a wild coyote on the loose. Police surrounded the 'coyote' and began closing in before realizing it wasn't real.

My fake coyotes even alerted our neighbors who called to warn us not to go outside. So the coyotes fooled everyone... every human one, that is. The geese love them, ignore them and poop on them. I guess it's true... you just can't fool mother nature.