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This time last year, Premier Medical Plaza had a big mess.

The four-story medical facility at Wendover Avenue and Premier Drive in north High Point was brand new, outfitted with spacious, modern physicians’ offices and diagnostic labs and attracting a flock of patients from this growing section of town.

Along with patients, however, the medical office complex was also attracting Canada geese.

By the dozens.

Canada geese in flight are beautiful creatures. They gracefully fly in a “V” formation and announce their presence with a distinctive honk. From the ground looking up, they are beautiful.

From the ground looking down, well, not so much.

Shortly after the medical facility opened, the geese moved onto the lawn and parking lot. With their presence came their, ahem, poop.
Lots of it.

According to one of many websites devoted to humanely reducing and relocating populations of Canada geese, a goose will produce between one and two pounds of droppings per day. Each female Canada goose lays five to seven eggs a year. Geese can live up to 20 years.

I won’t bore you with the math, but the bottom line is this: A lot of Canada geese means a lot of goose poop.

“They were an absolute nuisance,” said Duncan Chapman, building and grounds director for Cornerstone Health Care’s offices at Westchester Drive and Premier Drive. “It was like this phantom thing. The geese would come in at night and on weekends. I’d come here in the morning and find the parking lot blanketed with goose poop.”

Chapman wasn’t exaggerating. Within a step or two of your car door, you’d find yourself paddling through poop.

“I got so desperate,” Chapman said, “I brought my leaf blower from home to clean up the parking lot and sidewalks during the drought.”

But blowing off the dried mess was just a temporary solution. I won’t even attempt to describe how much worse the droppings were in their original state. Though Chapman couldn’t predict exactly when the geese would reappear, he could guarantee you that they would come back and bomb the grounds.

Goose poop on a parking lot means goose poop on the bottoms of shoes. And goose poop on shoes means that this dastardly mess quickly made its way into the building and onto the carpets.

With Premier Medical Plaza housing medical offices for Cornerstone Health Care and High Point Regional Health System, exposing patients to slippery droppings was more than a nuisance. It was a hazard.

Chapman quickly went to work searching for a solution to the infestation. He talked with pest control companies who recommended solutions such as spraying the ground with grape juice (which is not only expensive, it washes off with each rain or is cut away every time the grass is mown) and hiring dogs to patrol the grounds and chase away the offenders.

Chapman even found a service that brings border collies out to golf courses to flush out the geese. But because Premier Medical Plaza’s pests visited sporadically, how do you know when to schedule a visit from the goose-chasing dogs? It was another expensive and impractical proposition.

Then Ransey Neighbors came to the rescue. A courier for Cornerstone Health Care who works at the Premier site, Neighbors was acutely aware of the poop problem.

“It was not a very pleasant greeting for our patients,” Neighbors said. “Welcome to Cornerstone Health Care,” he added with a strong touch of sarcasm.

So Neighbors started doing some research of his own. Wesleyan Christian Academy on Eastchester Drive had a goose problem on its soccer field and resolved it with a stuffed coyote. Darned if that stuffed predator didn’t scare the geese away.

But Neighbors, Chapman and Ken Baker, Premier Medical Plaza’s manager of building and grounds, feared a few stuffed coyotes might do more harm than good. After all, they do look awfully lifelike. No need to scare patients, too.

Then Neighbors struck gold when he found www.watchdoggoosepatrol.com. This company sells dog decoys mounted on swiveling, springy posts that make the black corrugated cutout of a shepherd move in even the slightest breeze.

Better yet, the dogs come five to a pack for $299 and are guaranteed to scare away the geese.

By golly, they worked like a charm.

Now, the five dog decoys have reduced the goose population at Premier Medical Plaza from dozens down to two, and Chapman and Neighbors think the pair of geese that remain have a nest by the retention pond that they will not leave until the babies are hatched and mobile.

One thing is for certain — the parking lots and grassy knolls around the building are infinitely cleaner. A recent walk around the facility yielded one fresh dropping — a far cry from the poop-blanketed parking lot of last year.

Now all Chapman has to do for goose control is to move the dogs every few days, or else the geese get wise to the decoys. The building’s employees like the pretend pups so much they’ve given them names: Lassie, Old Yeller, Benji, Rin-Tin-Tin and Marley.

Feel free to drop by and give them a pat. They definitely don’t bite.

Contact Cathy Weaver at CWeaverNR@gmail.com