geese

The geese are flying.  That sounds as though it could be a secret password, akin to Masefield's The Wolves are Running, but it is simply a statement of fact.  Opening the front door just after dark this afternoon, we heard a wild cacophony from beyond the other side of the field hedge, then a great flock of geese, flying in V formation, appeared charging overhead, low and fast, heading south.  A couple of mini-formations straggled behind, their individual harsh honks failing to blend with the rest of the chorus.

A friend of ours is a wildfowler.  That is a demanding sport.  You have to be able to shoot, and you have to be able to identify what species you're aiming at before you pull the trigger.  You don't always have long to think about it.  There are stiff legal penalties for killing protected species.  If you are going to eat meat then wildfowl, killed cleanly with an accurate shot, and living freely until that moment, eating wild forage, has to be one of the most ethical meat sources there is.  More ethical than intensively reared animals living in crowded conditions, in groups larger than their social instincts evolved to cope with, travelling for many hours when they are sent to slaughter.

It's tough for farmers when wild forage includes their crops.  A couple of weeks ago, for a couple of days, there was a big flock of geese grazing on one of the fields just up the road, which has been sown with some sort of cereal that's now showing a few centimetres high.  I'd never seen geese there before, and on the third morning they were gone.  They had orange bills, but when I looked at a goose identification article in an old RSPB magazine, that didn't narrow it down much.

In European history, The Wild Geese were Irish soldiers fighting on the Continent.  Regiments were raised over three centuries for many countries and in many wars, driven by a complex mixture of Catholic anti-English sentiment, and commercial mercenary considerations.

The Barnacle Goose was held to be a fish during the Middle Ages, meaning that it could be eaten on Fridays without offending the tenets of the church.

Goosey Goosey Gander wandered upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber, but I can't find a reliable explanation of where the rhyme comes from, and whether it was originally a reference to something else.  There is a popular idea among Internet users that it refers to the persecution of Catholic priests, but no evidence that I'd care to use in a degree level essay, even at Level One.

The small city of Goes in Zeeland in the south-western Netherlands has a goose in its coat of arms, and the gift shops sell wooden cut-outs of a white goose with a ribbon around its neck.  It is a pleasant place, with a tiny marina at the end of a long canal like a fairy grotto (or at least there used to be one) and an enormously tall TV tower.

Rome was saved from attack by the Gauls when the noise made by geese awoke the sleeping inhabitants.  According to current Internet mythology they were a flock of sacred geese.  When I was at school and first heard the story they were just geese.

And of course if you can find the right sort of goose it will lay golden eggs.