Flaps Up! Geese Coming In For A Landing!

As I write this, Canada geese are flying over our house, so close to the ground at times that the actual swoosh of individual wingbeats are heard if one stands outside. They’re talking in honks and sqwonks as they fly, the sound so loud that it’s the rural equivalent of a big city rush hour traffic jam. We get occasional flocks of ducks passing over, too, but during migration, every night at dusk, tens of thousands of geese gather together on a bend of the river that lies across the street from our home.

As I’m the ever inquisitive sort, when I watch the geese (as with everything else) I have questions. Why don’t they ever crash into each other? How do they fly together in such huge flocks without the goose equivalent of air traffic control? Who decides which path they’ll take, and how far they’ll fly before stopping to rest? What are they saying?

Why did one fly into Fabio’s face a few years back?

Aha! Finally! A question with an answer! That was human error, according to Fabio himself. As he tells it,

“This roller coaster went by a pond where there are hundreds of geese that nest there and this was opening day so these geese didn’t have time to get out of the way, and when the roller coaster hit the water they killed several geese. I heard they were having major problems with the geese. They spent millions of dollars on this roller coaster and they didn’t put nets around the coaster to protect the geese or people. They closed the ride fast. So it wasn’t a case of some random goose that flew by, they built the ride right through a geese habitat. You would see geese flying through the path of the roller coaster, they’re migrating birds. In the winter the geese weren’t there so they just built right across the geese’s area so when the spring came around, they had that problem with geese getting in the way of the ride. Had it been a child that had been hit that hard the child might have been killed.”

Hello…? what’s wrong with picture?

sqwONK! THUD! PooFT!

*feathers fly everywhere*

Even if there wasn’t any danger to the roller coaster’s occupants, and you didn’t care about fatalities to the geese, didn’t the park’s developers consider that it might be a tad disturbing to go whizzing in a roller coaster through a pond filled with dead geese?

“Look Mommy! Dead birdies!”

“Eeewwwwwwwww!”

What were they thinking?

Oopsie - there I go, asking questions again!

Questions! I always have questions!

I wonder… do geese ever ask questions?

Sqwonk!