Ode to Geese Feet
Okay, so the building I work in is right by a pond, and the result is that there are a lot of Canada geese around, especially this time of year. The result of that is that I am not a fan of geese. They are messy, loud, threatening creatures, who like to walk down the road in front of your car at 1/2 a mile per hour.
If I, occasionally, admit to any sort of a soft spot for them, it mostly involves their feet. You think I’m crazy, but I will explain, and then you will recognize that I am an absurd genius!
- Geese have freaking dinosaur feet! They’re black and scaly. In mud or slushy snow (see figure 1) they leave footprints that look like they were made by velociraptors. And that’s because geese kind of are velociraptors, just without the teeth. Yes, the feet are webbed, but if you get close enough to get a proper look, the webbing does not convincingly hide the dinosaur that lies beneath. Black and scaly – like their hearts!
- Goose footprints are whimsical. On slush you get dinosaur feet. But then with a lighter impression you get – what? Alien glyphs maybe? Some sort of funky upholstery design? What do you think? When I look at this picture (figure 2: footprints on top of a shrubbery no less) I see an ephemeral cave painting of migrating manta-rays. I love it. I can’t not.
- Walking over snow, a herd* of geese sounds like a hush of type-writers. It’s the strangest, most compelling sound – so many feet, stepping so lightly. Tap tap tap… Hush hush hush hush hush hush…
* Footnote: Geese eat grass – they move in a ‘herd‘, okay? Without goslings around they are just not cute enough to be called a ‘gaggle’.
Now, I should admit that the type-writer feet remind me of a couple of other sounds I also love to catch glimpses whispers of, and so there is clearly something working on my hind-brain to make me love something that is ultimately quite random. But some sounds are like secrets, and precious when you find them.
One is the sound of snow falling in a forest. It’s a soft, subtle, hush of a sound (as though the word ‘hush’ were invented for an actual sound and not the absence of one), and it’s like it turns the whole forest into some giant blanket that’s getting tucked in all around you.
The other is back to geese again, and it’s the faint creaking sound their wings seem to make when they fly overhead. I know I’m not making this up, because I also heard this described in a story once (Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar), though now I can’t remember if I read it in the story before or after I heard it for myself. It’s not a flapping or swooshing sound. It’s like the air is the sea, and when the geese fly through it they become ships built to sail upon it, swaying and shifting, swiftly creaking in the wind.