Geese find home in Sarasota neighborhood

Breakfast is served at 9 a.m. at the Peters’ house.

It’s still quiet in the Sherwood Estates neighborhood, but the Peters have mouths to feed. The neighborhood sits just north of the Nottingham neighborhood on McIntosh Road.

There is no do-good vigilante, but Sherwood Estates is a kingdom of sorts, populated by an abundance of animals and people, the animals’ dutiful stewards. But of its charges, the neighborhood has two obvious favorites.

They stick out among a flock of about a dozen ducks that have already gathered on the banks of the pond abutting the Peters’s back yard.

“These are my babies,” Joan Peters said as she looked out from her lanai.

A pair of geese waddle up to Steve Peters, eager for their morning meal. It’s a friendly routine between the Peters and the geese and it’s one the Peters, along with the rest of the neighborhood, has embraced.

“Everybody knows where Millie and Jerry are,” Peters laughed.

The pair are infamous in the Sherwood Estates neighborhood. Known as Millie and Jerry or Romeo and Juliet depending on which side of the street they’re on, the two geese have lived in the neighborhood longer than some of its residents.

Neighborhood legend has it that a longtime Sherwood Estates resident named Mrs. Higgins put the original pair in the pond at least 30 years ago as goslings.

Jerry (or Romeo) has had multiple mates. Sandy Granstaff, whose husband used to be the pair’s primary caretaker before he died five years ago, said Juliet (or Millie) has been a fixture in the neighborhood for about five years.

In the Granstaff home the geese are known as Romeo and Juliet, but she said they have had other names during their time in the neighborhood.

“They’ve had several,” Granstaff said. “The only one we ever called them was Romeo and Juliet. They don’t come when they’re called anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.”

Granstaff has lived in the neighborhood for 11 of Jerry’s at least 30 years. She doesn’t exactly remember when it happened, but she remembers him arriving in their yard one afternoon, bloodied on one side.

Ultimately, his wing had to be amputated, making him even easier to spot. Yet, it wasn’t much of a loss, Granstaff said.

“He didn’t fly anyway,” she said.

It’s one of many characteristics that make these two geese easy to track. In addition to Jerry’s missing limb, Millie sports a disfigured beak — a war wound from a brush with a neighborhood dog.

“She wanted to lay her eggs behind that big tree in our backyard,” Granstaff said. “I even put up a net from one end of the fence to the other so she couldn’t poke her nose in there.”

But it wasn’t enough to keep Millie from attempting to defend her eggs from the neighborhood dog on the other side — an altercation that ended with her losing the front portion of her top beak.

The eggs were fine. Well, they were as fine as the pair’s eggs usually are.

“They started laying their eggs every year around here and none of them ever hatched,” Granstaff said. “My husband would bring it and hold it up to the light and he was trying to get a baby out of this bunch.”

So for 30 years it’s just been Jerry and his mate. They’re not Sherwood Estate’s only feathered residents. Joan Peters tends to her ducks. One neighbor even has an egret that knocks on the door daily for hotdogs and gizzards.

But Millie and Jerry ( or Romeo and Juliet) are, by far, the rulers of Sherwood. It’s a neighborhood that cares for its neighbors — both human and otherwise. People chip in for vet care for their favorite pair of geese and keep feed available for the other animals.

Otters routinely gather in the Peters’ backyard and ducks continue to rest on Granstaff’s bank. For them, their neighborhood is as much the animals’s as it is theirs.

“It’s good to live where you can see stuff like that and still let them be wild,” Granstaff said.