A Gang of Geese

Yesterday it sounded like I adore every living creature on earth. I wish that were true. But, truth be told, I am scared of geese. And swans.

Why, you wonder, would a bird-lover be afraid of swans and geese? Well, they’re strong and smart and territorial and aggressive. Like dogs. Like attack dogs with wings and beaks.

I once spent a week with a friend in a wonderful wooden house on stilts in Ratanakiri, in northern Cambodia. Directly across the road from her front gate lived a gang of geese. I don’t know who picked the word ‘flock’ for geese. Please. We’re talking a Gang of Geese. A Mafia of Geese, really. Whatever organized crime goes down in Ratanakiri, I’m sure those geese have a wing in. They’re probably organizing the poaching of their rarer avian relatives in the forest, just to strengthen their control of the town. Geese clearly fall in my unbiased BBC (Bad Birders of Cambodia, remember?) category of Ruffian Birds.

At any rate, whenever I set foot out of the gate onto the red earthen road, the Gang would hiss and flip their insolent wings and deliberately obstruct my path. I ended up edging along the margin of the road in the mud and, occasionally, running away from a leg-threatening experience. What I needed was a golf umbrella, one of those huge umbrellas with a spike on it. With one of those you’d have flapping action and stabbing action, like God gave the goose in the first place, and consequent goose-human confrontations might be a fairer fight. Or the threat of goose-liver pate. Maybe just a tin would do it. You could hold it out as you edged out the gate and say, You really want a piece of this? My kind consumes your kind’s liver. Back, foul birds, back!

Yes, there is cowardice and malice in my soul. Still, geese are scary. And I think swans are like big white or black geese with longer necks. So when everyone else is scattering bread at their feet for the lovely creatures, I’m keeping a 10 foot perimeter and showing empty hands. That’s all I have to say about this.