One morning last week, Meagan Dahlgren and some of her staff couldn’t get in to work.

They were blockaded by an expectant couple who sat in front of the door at the Albertsons store where Dahlgren is store director, at 3660 S. Mason St. in Fort Collins.

The pair finally had to be scared off so Dahlgren and the others could get inside.

It’s not as though Dahlgren was mistreating a customer, however.

The couple is a pair of Canada geese who have returned to Dahlgren’s store for the seventh year in a row, hoping to hatch a new gaggle of offspring.

Customers can see the female goose nestled on a pile of mulch bags for sale in front of the store. She’s easy to spot, thanks to her neck band, the cones and caution tape in front of the mulch and a giant hot-pink sign that reads “Stay Back, Nesting Geese/Federally Protected.”

“Sometimes they can be a little aggressive, so that’s why we have the signs up,” Dahlgren said. “If people go near their nest, they tend to get a little aggressive.”

The male goose is never far, often sitting in a parking space about 20 yards away or sometimes nibbling on the grass on the southwest corner of Horsetooth Road and College Avenue. He watches warily as customers push shopping carts past his mate—geese mate for life—and he will hiss or flap his wings if people get too close.

The geese have been back for about two weeks and they’ll stay two or three more, until the eggs hatch. Dahlgren said she thinks they returned early this year; the eggs usually hatch around Mother’s Day, after being laid in early April.

The pair have not had success every year.

One spring, the store did not get its shipment of garden supplies early enough for the geese, and store staff put out piles of firewood instead, Dahlgren said.

“They laid (eggs) on the firewood and some of their eggs broke,” she said.

Another year, the mulch shipment didn’t come at all and the mother goose laid her eggs on the concrete in front of the store. A fox came and took them.

But the geese were undeterred, apparently.

“No matter what, they’re going to come back,” Dahlgren said. “We just expect it every spring.”

The staff is fond of them, and will even help the goslings get to water for the first time. When the gaggle is ready to go, employees will clear a path for them through the parking lot to a ditch under College Avenue, which leads the geese right to Warren Lake.

“They’re just poofy little things; they look like little tennis balls,” Dahlgren said.

Aside from occasional hissing—and door blockading—the geese are pretty comfortable with the scores of people that pass them every day.

The city’s golf manager, Jerry P. Brown, is all too familiar with that.

“You’re absolutely right, they have virtually no fear of man,” he said.

On a golf course, where Brown is authorized to harass geese to get them to leave, they will simply walk away if people or golf carts approach. They are relatively domesticated, for wild birds.

“The only real deterrent to geese is a predator or a perceived predator, and that’s it,” Brown said, a tinge of exasperation in his voice. “The geese adapt to everything, seriously.”

Canada geese are as ubiquitous in Fort Collins as cars with Colorado State University stickers, but it was not always that way. Gurney “Father Goose” Crawford, a conservationist with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, first brought them to College Lake, near Horsetooth Reservoir, in the 1950s. Those resident geese acted as living decoys, and after a while, migrating birds that had traditionally wintered in New Mexico never made it past the Front Range.

“And now they’re everywhere!” Brown said.

Back then, residents loved the animals and were proud of the city’s place on the Western Flyway, a prime route for several species of migratory birds. That’s one reason the current city logo features three geese flying south. It didn’t take long for the honeymoon to end, however.

“By the 1970s and 1980s, we were hauling geese off to address local complaints about nuisance geese,” said Jim Gammonley, a bird biologist with the Division of Wildlife, in an e-mail message.

So far, the Albertsons’ geese don’t seem to be much of a nuisance.

“We have customers that have shopped here forever, and they always follow the geese. We have people who will come and take pictures,” Dahlgren said.

So are they a pain?

No way, silly goose.