Not everybody welcomed the presence, so close to a park with soccer fields and a playground, of a large concentration of aggressive geese and the abundant byproducts of their appetites. Caught between those who found them charming and those who saw them as pests, the geese became a political issue.

By the 2000s, they had attracted a vociferous cadre of defenders who called themselves the Friends of the White Geese. The group — which seems never to have included more than a dozen people — coalesced in an irate response to the apparent destruction of the birds’ nesting area. BU, at the behest of city and state managers, had cleared some land around the bridge in preparation for a planned network of bicycle and pedestrian paths.

More ominously, a couple of years later, some of the geese were found bludgeoned and hacked to death. Although an MSPCA inquiry failed to identify the perpetrators, the Friends of the White Geese suspected the sinister influence of government. They would also speculate that the attacks were linked to the assault and murder, that same year, of a young woman who had been living on the street in Harvard Square. Four members of a local gang were arrested and eventually convicted of her death. There were no indications of a connection to the goose attacks, but this, according to the Friends of the White Geese, was because the MSPCA had botched its investigation.