Man, I knew the geese were vicious as heck. I had heard lots of stories about geese attacking folks for their croissants near the University of Waterloo campus, and children getting chased by geese outside the Catalyst building where I work, among other stories. I know in the case of the children, their parents started chasing the geese, which probably didn’t help. Look at that. Geese are trying to protect their babies, and so are the humans, and the humans should know better than to chase the geese!
Then it happened to me last year. My incident was on the milder side, but who knows what could have happened if I wasn’t saved by a passing car. Domino and I were walking home from the Ion train and I heard this intermittent hissing sound. I could have sworn it sounded far away. I was sure someone was just spraying something with a hose or something. Then a car pulled up beside me and someone said “Ma’am, there are geese behind you!” Like a dumbass, I pulled closer to one side, as if they would pass me and go on their merry way. I pulled toward the grass! What if I just stomped their baby? Yeah, pulling over sounds like a great idea, chief. Then the driver said “They’re gone now.” But if that car didn’t do that, I may have been the next victim, and I would have found out just how ineffective Pooca Poocking at geese would have been.
I never noticed this pattern, but the time when they are the most aggressive is in April when they are nesting. There’s a month there where they won’t take any crap from us humans, and don’t mind telling us so with a hiss and a lunge and a peck peck peck! And this did happen to me last April, so I guess that fits.
Now someone has decided to do something to help us coexist with the geese. Anirudh Dabas, a first-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo, built WaddleLoo, an interactive map to tell us where the geese are nesting, and help us avoid them.
How it works is people take pictures of geese they see, and AI looks at them to see if they look like they’re protecting any babies or eggs, and judges their posture for aggressiveness. Then they get categorized on levels of risk, and if it sees a nest there, it gets pinned on the map. Then people can enter their start and endpoints of a route to class, for example, and their level of comfort with geese, and WaddleLoo will set them a route that should keep them safe. That’s kind of neat!
I guess the developer of this app was dive-bombed by a goose, and it scared him so much that he wanted to help others. I just love his level of exuberance about his invention. There’s something infectious about it. Just watch this video!
I hope he never loses that excitement. And I also find it adorable every time he says something like “When you see a geese.” I do not want to make fun of him. It’s just that our language needs to be made fun of. Just ask Brian Regan.
Singular: goose! Plural: Geese! Sure. That makes a lot of sense.
And now I have the unanswerable questions, or at least partially unanswerable. As a blind person, I would like to avoid the geese I can’t see. How accessible is this map thing to a screen reader? It says it’s based off of Google Maps. So does it do turn by turn directions that I can read in a step by step fashion? Or is it just an array of arrows and pictures? That question can be answered.
Here’s the unanswerable part, and worse, I don’t know if there is a solution. Some routes are safer for me to navigate because there are landmarks I can follow. A perfect example is when I’m walking to the Fairway station. There is the route everybody who can see loves, which involves sprinting like cute little squirrels through the parking lot. It’s shorter, and will arrive at the train platform, but it’s open, and there are no clues to tell me if I am veering or not. Then there’s the longer way I travel which involves running through these little pedestrian islands. It takes longer, but it’s safer for me. Does WaddleLoo direct the user as the crow flies? Would it direct me through buildings that I might not be familiar with? In an attempt to save me from going on a wild goose chase, is the map going to send me on a different wild goose chase? I suppose if I got to read the step by step directions, I could make decisions about how I could travel this route or if it’s even possible. But if it’s all pictures, I’d be toast.
Even if I personally can’t use it, I do think it’s a really cool idea and I hope he has all the success in the world. I also hope he can get some funding so he’s not having to check the app every few hours for troll images all by himself for too long. I admire his dedication, but I don’t want the poor guy to burn out!