Her Goose Is Cooked Unless City Relents

A nervous Chris Rodriguez stepped up to the microphone in the Huntington Beach City Council chambers Monday night, fidgeted with a prepared speech, then decided to get right to the point.

“I know it sounds strange,” the 31-year-old mother of two small children told council members, “but I have a goose who is my guard dog.”

For the next several minutes Rodriguez kept the audience in stitches as she earnestly tried to explain her predicament, chuckling herself at the absurdity of it all.

“I’m allergic to dogs . . . and I’ve got a husband who’s gone 90% of the time (on business). . . . I even tried to get her licensed with the city as a guard dog. I need some help. I’d like to keep her.”

The “her” in question is Stormer, the reliable security goose who honks like a truck driver and patrols the family’s backyard--and keeps the lawn trimmed to boot. But Stormer’s trumpeted warnings of oncoming visitors have apparently raised the dander of at least one neighbor.

City code enforcement officer Don Shaw, responding to what he termed “a complaint,” fired off a letter on June 10 to the Rodriguez family, ordering the 10-pound guard goose out within five days. The municipal code, Shaw wrote, forbids keeping fowl within 50 feet of property lines and within 100 feet of an inhabitable structure other than one’s own.

“I don’t think of her as a fowl,” Rodriguez said Tuesday. “She’s my goose. She’s our guard dog. If geese are good enough for the United States Army, it ought to well be good enough for the City of Huntington Beach.”

Rodriguez was referring to the highly publicized gaggle of geese that since May, 1986, have been assigned to Army installations in West Germany as web-footed sentries. Historically, the waddling birds have been deployed on the Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; and they were used as bridge guards in the Vietnam War.

“Why not my backyard?” Rodriguez wanted to know, as she chased Stormer around a swing set Tuesday, hoping to provoke her 1-year-old bird’s hair-trigger honk. Alas, there was only a mutter.

Steven Rodriguez, 4, was not surprised. “Now watch,” he said with exasperation, “she’ll go hide under the slide just when you come.”

When she returned Monday from a weekend trip and found the letter, Rodriguez said, she called Shaw and was told that legal action would follow if Stormer was still hanging around by week’s end. It is, Shaw said Tuesday, a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 fine.

Baffled About Complaint

Rodriguez said she is baffled at which neighbor would complain without approaching her first, since the bird has no odor, is not visible from most yards in the neighborhood and makes no more noise than a barking dog might.

Shaw acknowledged that on a trip to the Rodriguez home he detected no odor or offensive noise, although he did not enter the backyard. But the law is the law, Shaw said, so now only the City Council can save Stormer.

At Monday night’s council meeting, Mayor Jack Kelly directed the city staff to review the goose matter.

“As far as I’m concerned, these ordinances have been made to be adjusted through the process by way of a new ordinance or a variance,” Kelly said Tuesday. “I would have to say the reasonable approach to this thing is to let the lady have her goose.”

From her backyard next door, which sits several feet below the Rodriguez property, a goose-loving neighbor, Carol Elston, can peer through a chain-link fence and look squarely into Stormer’s face. “It makes a good watchdog,” said Elston, 59.

“The goose doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I kinda like it. I’d rather hear the goose honking than a dog howling all night.”

Elston has lived in her home 16 years--long before Stormer moved in next door--and she is at home more since she retired recently as an office manager.

She said she would “absolutely” sign a letter to City Hall vowing her support for the honking sentry: “I hope they can keep it. I’d miss Stormer.”

City codes are odd, she added: “You can have a dog that runs around and poops all over your yard and your neighbors’ (yards), but you can’t have a penned-up goose.”

The couple who live on the other side of the Rodriguez family were not home Tuesday afternoon. But they also have said they would go on record as supporting Stormer, both Elston and Rodriguez said.

Pam Walker, 31, whose backyard is within earshot of the honker, said she hasn’t complained about the goose, either, although she has heard her. “I’m not happy about it, but I can live with it unless it got noisier,” Walker said, adding, that she would like to know who played the stereo so loud down the street.

Of Rodriguez and her goose, Mayor Kelly said: “I hope we can help her. I liked her; she was great comic relief.”