The solitary goose does not drink
or eat,
It flies around and calls,
missing its flock ...
It looks into the distance:
it seems to see,
It's so distressed,
it thinks that it can hear.
Unconsciously, the wild ducks
start to call,
Cries of birds are everywhere
confused.
-- Du Fu, "The Solitary Goose," circa 770
There are almost always an even number of Canada geese.
This is because they pair off. All the books and websites say they mate for life, but this is a bit of an oversimplification. Canada geese are socially monogamous, which means, like a lot of birds, there exists a relationship between an adult male and an adult female for the purposes of reproduction and rearing of the young. They cooperate, they build a nest, they look out for each other.
But they are not necessarily genetically monogamous; geese fool around. Sometimes. If they have the opportunity. They are relatively discreet and we wouldn't know anything about it were it not for DNA testing. Geese can certainly have drama; mates can get miffed and scold each other. We can see this sometimes, walking along the river trail. A goose will fuss at her mate, honking and pumping her neck up and down. Then they'll bump off the shore and glide away together on the water.
Geese relationships can get complicated. When a blind, gay, interspecies-polyamorous goose named Thomas died in 2018, the Wellington (New Zealand) Bird Rehabilitation Trust where he lived wrote: "Thomas became a favourite after segregating himself from the other geese in the area and instead choosing a black swan named Henry as his lifelong mate. Even when Henry found a swan mate (Henrietta) this didn't stop Thomas from staying true and loyal and even playing 'uncle' to their cygnets when hatched!"
If they can manage such vivid complications, it's not too much to imagine geese can split the blanket. Other animals do.
At a zoo in Austria in 2012, the Galapagos tortoise couple Bibi and Poldi broke up after about a century of cohabiting. For decades, at least since the 1920s, they had slept with with their shells touching. They had the longest known relationship of any two animals on earth.
Then one day Bibi started hissing at Poldi. (He probably had it coming.) She bit a chunk of his shell. They had to be separated for fear that she'd kill him. (Again, she might have been--she probably was--justified; I have no brief for Poldi. #cancelPoldi.) To date, all their keepers' efforts at arranging a reconciliation have been for naught.
But keep in mind that, in the wild, Galapagos tortoises are neither socially or genetically monogamous. Many don't even seem interested in keeping company with other tortoises for any reason. A Galapagos tortoise called Lonesome George became famous for his reticence to mate. He tried a few times during his 30 years in captivity, but never successfully fertilized any eggs. So when he died in 2012--at the relatively young for a tortoise age of about 100--his subspecies, Geochelone abingdoni, also called the Pinta Island tortoise or Abingdon Island tortoise, was declared extinct. (You can now see him, stuffed with foam, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.)
So maybe Bibi and Poldi were never meant to be together anyway. Bibi decided it was better to live alone than to live a lie. (#teamBibi).
But Canada geese are not Galapagos tortoises. They bond. They hang out. They seem pretty social.
Everyday we see groups of 12 or 14 amiably loitering along the river banks, like the pointillist Parisians in Seurat's La Grande Jatte. They can be pretty tolerant of humans--I've heard of people becoming friends with individual geese, with the birds affectionately rubbing their beaks against their favorite folks. We're not there, but they do seem to be used to us, and us to them. Most of the time our dogs don't bark and pull toward them, most of the time they don't squawk and fly away. So long as social distancing standards aren't broken, we seem able to get along.
But it is only responsible to add that geese are extremely territorial and protective of their nests and goslings. If you get too close they hiss; if you don't move along they might mock charge, or charge for real or fly at you, pecking at you and beating their wings. On the Internet you will read that the biggest danger posed by an attacking goose is that you might fall while trying to get away, but my grandmother once told me she was pecked by a goose who took a square-inch chunk out of her arm. My grandmother also used to tell people she was a full-blooded member of the Cherokee tribe and to rub brandy on a teething baby's gums.)
Most of our Canada geese live here year round; they are not strong migrators, but a few make their way north to the Great Lakes for about a month during mid-summer to early fall. They got close to extinction during the 1950s, but conservation efforts brought them back to the point that some people, including some of my neighbors, consider them nuisances. No one picks up goose poop.
But I enjoy them, and am looking forward to when their eggs begin to hatch and they walk their hatchlings single-file down to the river to learn to be geese. The mother leads and the gander cabooses, keeping the goslings in line, for they are impressionable little idiots bound to follow anything that moves, be it human or canine or probably automotive.
It's argued that, unlike dogs and cats who almost always understand that they are dogs and cats, some birds--in particular, goslings and ducklings--can imprint on humans and believe they are human. (Have you ever considered that you might, in fact, be a goose?)
Du Fu, the Chinese poet who is said to have had as much influence on Chinese literature as Shakespeare had on western culture, saw the lone goose as a symbol of a great and noble man suffering unjust exile (very much like himself).
But geese are not meant to be solitary creatures. If a mate dies, the surviving goose will live independently while seeking another mate, but if it doesn't find one, will almost always remain with its flock, sometimes helping out a mated pair with their young. We see this sometimes, a throuple of geese in Riverside Park.
I admire their society. No goose should be lonesome forever.
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MovieStyle on 05/03/2020