Some Thoughts on Geese

 I'm glad that there is music as background to the video a friend just posted of snow geese landing in and around an icy pond, instead of the honking! They are beautiful birds, for sure, as are the Canada geese which live in profusion here at the lake. But while I'm often in tears at the Beauty and Wonder of Nature, I remain in some aspects a pragmatist. 
Geese make a gawdawful racket, and when there are flights of 60-100 of them coming in for splashdown, it's both awesome to see and a very noisy proposition, as the newcomers often get the other hundreds on the ground roiled into a honker's chorus. Our park newspaper is called "The Quacker". Let me tell you that our ducky friends are far less of an obvious acoustic factor in our lives than the Wagnarian stentorizations of the several species of geese here. Out newspaper could be more accurately named "The Lake Oaks Honker" with no chance of that being misunderstood as a reference to a nose. And then there is mating season. 
All that I have said above pales in grandiosity during that time, when the geese leave their usual grassy haunts by the water, and make most of our rooftops their podiums for the loud and constant advertisement of their allegedly superior coupling qualities. Of course, the reverberations through the structural material of our homes adds to our greatly involuntary awareness of their amorous vocal, and yes, physical combats over our heads. It's not uncommon to see disgruntled homeowners with a high-pressure nozzle on their hose washing a coating of geese off their now besoiled roof. 
Don't get me wrong: I love birds. I sit many evenings on a bench by the shore path, my 7x50 binoculars handy, and watch herons--both blue and green--coots, egrets, cormorants, black swans, Muscovy, Wood, Bufflehead, domestic, and other ducks, and a dozen other kinds of birds indigenous to our lake. This is a birder's emporium. I am grateful for the show, and for that most of these creatures will actually walk by, and even if suspicious, will trust you to be tame. That goes for the deer and skunks as well, and the odd bipeds in electric carts. But one cannot help but be then aware of the huge disproportion in the population of geese, here of at least three sorts. Wonderous as they are as creatures, in our circle they also live with us as very noisy and often dirty, arrogant, and inconvenient neighbors. And I still get a kick out of them.