People We Love

David Feld

David Feld finds ways for human communities to coexist with Canada geese, which were the only free wild animals he remembers seeing during his Brooklyn childhood. “Sometimes they flew low enough for me to hear the whoosh of their powerful wings,” he writes.

When goose droppings around a lake in Feld’s suburban Virginia neighborhood became a nuisance, his community was bitterly divided over whether to kill the birds. So Feld, a systems engineer, devised a nonviolent solution. The neighborhood adopted border collies to divert geese from yards and beaches, and volunteers acted as “egg addlers” to prevent the goose population from growing.

Feld co-founded the nonprofit GeesePeace to share his program and is working on a related project, DeerPeace.

Feld has seen conflicted communities transform their anger into a push for solutions. “Anytime you have a problem, you have energy,” he says.