Along with chickens, sheep, a dog, and a cat, our landlords (who are the best landlords ever) have a gaggle of geese. I won't get into the lengthy "discussion" Claire and I had when we first moved in about whether they were ducks or geese. Apparently Claire was out sick the day her kindergarten class learned the difference. (Correct me if I am wrong, but technically she was right, because geese are part of the duck family. But don’t tell her that.)
These are no ordinary geese, however. They seem to think they are roosters. Often at the crack of dawn they can be found outside our bedroom window worshiping the sun with a chorus of ear-splitting honks. They also like to honk explosively at other times of the day or late at night, for no reason at all. It seems very random to me.
I think they like us but just don't want to admit it. They are usually hanging around our door as if waiting to be invited in, but as soon as we come out they can't get away fast enough. They honk and hiss (yes, geese hiss - at least these do) and fall over each other trying to get away. At night you can slowly peel back the curtain covering our glass door and often see a goose inches away, peering inside. They also have the alarming habit of pecking on our door in manner that sounds EXACTLY like someone knocking. They don't do this incessantly, but only enough so that each time they do it we stop what we are doing and yell "come in." I don't for a minute think they are unaware of how this affects us. They know the perfect moment in a movie when a series of sharp thumps on the door will startle us the most.
Even though they can be annoying, what with having to zigzag our way to our cars to avoid their prodigious offerings, we like having them around. Although Sarah our landlady told us when we moved in that if they ever bothered us too much we could just have ourselves a "goose dinner."
3 comments:
Geese, ducks, and swans are all members of family Anatidae -- which is usually subdivided into two subfamilies, Anserinae (geese & swans) and Anatinae (ducks).
I wouldn't say that geese are members of the duck family, but they share a family with swans.
Of course it has been demonstrated (by Siegfried Scherer and others) that ducks, geese, and swans are all groups capable of interbreeding, and the whole Anatid family is closely related.
(Before you ask, I suspect there were 14 Anatids on the ark making sure Noah got up early in the morning).
Roosters are from an entirely different order (Galliformes vs. Anseriformes), but then again, a noisy bird by any other name ....
Isaac, you are inimitable. Thanks for clarifying the whole issue.
Oh my word Isaac! Did you do a research project on the Anserinae family in high school and had the info stashed in a back corner of your brain, or did you just look it up for the fun of it??? Silly Isaac.
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