Slow down!
That’s what Sandy Merry, Oxford’s animal control officer, is telling people after a Canada goose and several goslings were flattened by Route 67 traffic Monday afternoon.
Merry was driving north on Route 67 about 3 p.m. on her way to Oxford’s animal shelter when she noticed vehicles in front of her slow down near the intersection with Mountain Road.
“I noticed a traffic holdup, then I saw a mother goose and little babies all squashed in the road,” Merry said.
“It was just horrible,” Merry said. “People didn’t even care.”
One driver even ran over the mother goose a second time, Merry said. “Another two minutes or so and they could’ve made it across the street.”
Merry pulled her car over and called the animal shelter for help. She and others took the dead birds out of traffic and, while doing so, found three other goslings making their way toward the road.
They scooped them up before they could get into the danger zone.
After a bit of an effort, that is.
“They run fast, those little things,” Merry said. “It seems like they were born pretty recently, because none of them could fly.”
She took the rescued goslings to the Ansonia Nature Center, where the orphans are now recovering.
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Dawn Sotir, the ranger on duty at the nature center Monday afternoon when the goslings arrived, said they were in rough shape when they got there.
“They were scared half to death,” she said. “They don’t know where their mother is.”
But after some TLC from nature center staff, the baby geese improved.
“We hydrated them and fed them upon arrival,” she said. “They were a little scared and a little shocked, but they’re OK.”
Ansonia Nature Center Director Donna Lindgren said that once the baby birds are sufficiently recovered, nature center officials will try to find another mother goose in the area to which the goslings orphaned Monday could be introduced and, if all goes well, adopted.
“It very often works,” Lindgren said of the process.
Merry said she sees geese from time to time in town, but not as often as in years past. She suspects the ones she saw Monday were on their way to Hoadley Pond, which lies east of the roadway.
Merry said she thinks too many people drive at unsafe speeds on Route 67 — it was the site of three accidents last week that sent people to area hospitals.
“People need to stop speeding down the road like it’s a racetrack,” Merry offered. “The way that people fly on that road is ridiculous.”