Last Friday, we featured a video of the return of the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) to the pond after their curious disappearance months previously; the count was always either six or eight geese at any given time. A few days after that, I was looking out the bedroom window just after waking up in the morning to see nothing out there, until a flash of movement through the trees drew my attention, and a small flock of four or five came in to land further up by Turtle Island, some on the water and some actually on shore.
By the time I got downstairs, however, the numbers had increased significantly. Being blocked by various cypress trunks made it hard to be precise, but I dependably got at least fourteen. After feeding the cats, I took a bucket of corn down to the water’s edge – we won’t do this while the ducks are present because they’ll scatter and we’d rather not scare them off too often, but the geese are relatively complacent, just giving us a little distance. At that time, I got a count of nineteen, twice, which is a big jump in the number, literally overnight.
Obviously, the word was getting out that this was a safe place with food – but that got me to thinking, since no words were getting out at all. How, exactly, was this idea being communicated? And forgive me, because from this point on it’s only going to be idle and unedumacated speculation.
We’re oriented towards sound/speech/vocalization, so the first direction we tend to turn is thinking that the honks that the geese use from time to time are a method, and to be sure, there are subtle variations that can be found in the pitch and spacing and volume. I am reminded of our (human) neighbors in central New York, when one of their sons was now old enough to obtain his hunting license. They grew corn to feed their dairy cows, and the geese often used these fields after the harvest because it was a safe stopover and always had some leftover cobs available to snack upon. I could see the neighbor out there on the edge of the treeline, waiting for the geese to arrive, and when a flock was cruising in low, he gave forth with his goose call – only, he was imitating an alarm cadence, and the geese veered off and never landed. It’s not simply the sounds they make that matter.
So perhaps the geese now visiting our ponds have honked out the charms of their destination, but from experience, I can tell you that honking isn’t used that often at all, more often in flight and in gathering the flock together as one for takeoff. Since we’ve had at least two different groups visiting, this doesn’t seem to be a collective flock circumstance (especially when a flight can be as few as four or five geese or as many as several dozen, which could not be entertained on our little pond.) Moreover, for three days or more we had no more than eight, and then suddenly that number better than doubled. And to add to that, quite a few of them don’t fly in at all, but simply swim through the channel from The Bayou (which is much larger and even better protected, at least from a gooseley standpoint, because no one has access to the shoreline at all.)
Nonverbal cues are often far more prevalent in the animal kingdom, and indeed, we use them a lot more than we give credit for ourselves. We (perhaps just ‘I’) might ask what kind of behavior clues the others in? Is it that the initial group tended to leave some common meeting ground together to come up to our pond, or maybe how long they stayed away? Did they show little interest in food when they returned, suggesting that they’d been eating well while they were gone?
There’s a possibility that it’s a time of day thing, too – maybe geese have certain times that they seek food, and leaving for another spot at these times was indicative? Morning, of course, is prime feeding time for just about any diurnal animal, so suddenly heading out to another locale at that time perhaps says all that it needs to.
I’ve watched several movements that are repeated, from both the geese and the wood ducks, and they certainly seem to mean certain things though I have yet to hash out a decent ‘vocabulary,’ and of course I’m not able to see them at all when they’re about to leave The Bayou (or anyplace else) to come up to the main pond here. There may be some subtle communications of that nature, head bobs or shakes, flapping just before heading out, things like that. I’ve seen one goose always on lookout when anyone is feeding, same with the mallards, and this might be carried to the wood ducks too but they’re in such a frenzy when they finally do come up on shore and I’ve never seen one that’s committed to being the lookout, though often there’s one seeming to temporarily fulfill that duty. With the geese it’s more obvious, as are their warnings once we got too close; this really applied to the previous collection visiting, who were semi-habituated to us, while these are far more wary and maintain a certain distance out on the water when we’re nearby.
I have no conclusion to offer, just trying to hash out something that’s outside of our normal perspective, and offering perhaps a little insight into what any animal observer should try to pay attention to. Decent and definitive answers likely only come from dozens to hundreds of hours observing, and I’m certainly not at that level yet with any individual species (I tend to treat it as a buffet of many species and not concentrate on any one, which stretches things out a hell of a lot longer.) Naturally, anyone that has greater info is welcome to jump in and tell me where I’m all wet.
