If things are going to go wrong you can guarantee it'll be over the Christmas break. This year was no disappointment
On Christmas eve we had a mainline break that wasn't detected until Boxing day. The pumps were tripped on low pressure so luckily enough we didn't loose too much water or were left with a massive crater. I went in boxing day morning to do the fix and restore the watering program.
Worse still was the next day. We've got alot of Corella's in the area that have been displaced by the sudden and large growth and construction in the area. They've taken refuge on the golf course and are causing quite alot of destruction. I actually don't hold a grudge against them they're just wild animals doing what wild animals do.
This is typical of the damage they do to our greens although we've never seen it on this scale before.
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Repair is a tedious and time consuming job, I replaced about 200 plugs over the day. This is the process.
Plugs are taken from the nursery and transferred to the damaged areas.
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Next is the tedious bit, getting them level so they don't interfere with play. They're tickled up or down with the scissors then rolled flat with varying sizes of pvc pipe depending on how big the damaged area is. This process may have to be repeated a couple of times to get it right.
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And the repaired area. The grain or 'knap' of the turf will never match straight away but should change and heal for a seamless repair in a couple of weeks.
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The human response to this problem is to "shoot the bloody things" I'm not onboard with that, you can imagine the local outcry if we did that and I don't see why we should cull for the convenience of some rich old folk playing a social game. This is reinforced by the fact that the whole time I'm doing these repairs I'm dodging golf balls hit by people that value their game over everything else.
A few things have been tried. We brought in a trained eagle to scare them. Combined with flying kites in the effigy of an eagle in the days afterwards this approached worked for a couple of weeks before they cottoned on.
With all of the damage occurring in the half an hour before sunset we've been manually patrolling the course to move them on. This method works but takes 3 staff daily, we start before sunrise so the idea of coming back in for an hour of unpaid overtime at sunset hasn't been well received from the staff
We've put it to the members that the ones that live local, theres alot of them too, could volunteer to do some shifts but so far all we've heard has been crickets...