Honking Geese

4:53 p.m. As I have been sitting here typing my previous post, I have listened to several flocks of geese as the fly southward over the house toward the shores of Lake Ontario about four kilometers away. All morning they made their way from their overnight resting place in Oakville and Bronte harbours to fields of soybeans left unharvested in the farms another kilometer or two to the north. It would appear that the crop of soybeans was so poor in those fields that the farmers left them to be plowed under when the new crop season begins next spring. They are a bonanza for the geese, however, and with no ice yet formed on the lake, they are spending the coldest weather of the winter so far fattening themselves of the ample food supply.

The sound of the geese reminds me of a memorable experience in the spring 1963 when I was in Green Lake, WI. I wakened about dawn one morning to hear the same haunting calls of enormous flocks of Canada geese took off from their overnight roost. I went to the window to see what made so much noise. It was an incredible sight to see tens of thousands of geese rising from the lake to make their way northward toward wherever their would make their next stop.