Geese

Canada Geese, majestic birds (when they're not pooping on your baseball field), are populating Great Meadows in great numbers. Endlessly honking.

Great Meadows has, rightly, chosen the Canada Goose as its symbol.


I'd been thinking about geese recently because of something I'd read. A recent translation of Tsutomu Mizukami's Temple of the Wild Geese contains the following passage:

The panels of the fusuma had been painted in ink and gold dust. The setting was an ancient pine with enormous roots stretching its great branches out over a pond. Each of the needle-like leaves had been drawn in exquisite detail. A flock of wild geese, some perching, some flapping their wings, was pictured settling in the lower branches. As one bird was about to fly off, its white-feathered belly flashing in the evening sky, another nestled motionlessly on a branch, appearing as if it were part of a knot on the trunk of the pine.

I tried to imagine geese perching on tree branches and failed, I'm afraid. Is this even possible--could geese perch on branches if they tried? Are there actually geese native to Japan that can? Or is the writer (or translator(or artist in the story)) a little deficient in his knowledge of goose behavior/physiology? Or maybe it's a REALLY BIG pine tree.

The geese at Great Meadows are not perching on tree branches. They rest in the water and on reedy mounds. And then, as if silently signaled, they take off, sometimes in small family-sized groups, sometimes in huge honking masses.