The Persistence of Geese

Suddenly, in a day, everything has changed amongst the birds.

Winter was a time to hunker down.

Enormous flocks of Canada geese wintered with us, slumbering en masse at night on the iced lake, by day grubbing voraciously through a mantle of snow to pluck victuals from the turf. In their wake, a cacophony of churned earth and webbed foot prints.

Of a January vineyard morning, I would crunch through diamond-crusted snow before sunrise.

Coming to a small patch of open water, and the flotilla of ice where our swans slumber, I feel like I've entered a secret avian dream world: All is peace and crystalline beauty.

The swans allow a small trusted bevy of geese to sleep amongst them on their floating bed chamber, the rest banished to the lakeshore with the ducks. How very wise, I think, to have these squawky sentries close at hand during the vulnerable silent hours.

During these peaceful winter mornings, I observe that our ducks never sleep on the ice, except when there is a downy blanket of snow. On a snowy January morning, I arrive at sunrise to find our entire duck colony asleep on snowy ice. As the sun rises, they arise and begin chattering amongst themselves, waddling busily on the ice. (I think I could be content to watch ducks walk on ice all day.)

But change is afoot in the vineyard, the quickening of the year.

Skunk cabbage shoots rise steamily from the creekbed. Gliding raptors, aloft in a sky that is suddenly cerulean, dangle entrails of branches. On a rainy morning I notice our pair of mute swans display a newfound interest in golden willow branches that litter the lawn.

These quickening days: Behold! And turn your eyes to the March firmament:

To the South, golden rays, impossible blue skies, fluffy white clouds.

Northward, impending wintry nebula, dark and foreboding.

Snow flurries mix with drizzle and warmth.

This fleeting season, marked by the mysterious arrival of impossibly vivid ducks, with crimson necks.

Raw, windswept March, when you experience all of the seasons in just one day. The mysterious crimson ducks flit about on a choppy windswept lake for a just a few days, then disappear as quickly as the whiteout flurries that materialize to displace a mid-afternoon sliver of golden sun and clear blue sky.

The day of the crimson ducks marked a noticable change in avian behavior.

All winter everyone got along, but today our territorial male swan was bound and determined to keep a pair of Canada geese from nesting under a cherry tree. I could swear they are the exact same pair that nested here last year, under a dead pine tree. I christened them Irmgard and Heinrich, in homage to a certain Germanic persistence they seemed to possess.

As the days lengthen, gone are the large colonies of ducks who gobbled at the swan chow bowl on frigid winter days.

Gone the riotous gaggle of geese who slumbered on the ice by night and rooted riotously through vineyard rows for daytime grub.

Gone the marauding robins who came out of nowhere to strip to bare twigs a crabapple tree which had somehow held its fruit through Christmas.

On these transitory lion/lamb March days, the birds have all paired off:

The swans daub a nest from mud and leaves and willow branches in a swampy finger of the lake.

An iridescent mallard and his handsome brown speckled bride toddle about the shrubbery at sunrise, looking for a place where in a few weeks she may deposit her eggs.

A pair of elegant mourning doves coo beside a decaying old grape press in the rose bushes, seemingly grateful for the now bare earth on which to roost.

There is something to be said for a day tending a vineyard.

Even if it is a day that starts with pelting sleet and a glaze of ice. Especially if it is a day during that magic month when the year quickens perceptibly, and avian behavior takes a marked seasonal turn. An entire complex avian world goes about its seasons on the shore of this lake, and I feel privileged to be here to watch it unfold.

Throughout it all, in every season, a solitary Great Blue Heron swoops overhead, knowingly.

And I kind of get the feeling the heron is orchestrating the whole thing.

But as exciting as it is, to perceive each day advance into a new season, and sense a new warmth, and a hopeful stirring amongst the paired off water fowl, I find myself missing just a little bit those solitary winter days, and magic sunrise mornings, when an ever-changing cast of migratory waterfowl bedded down peaceably on a pallet of ice.

And I can't get past the persistence of these geese, this single pair who have staked their claim in hostile terrain.

Last year they built a nest under a dead pine tree. A tree crew felled the pine carcass, and ground it to mulch.

But Irmgard and Heinrich were back the next day, building a new nest atop the wood chips.

This year, after the rest of the wintering Canadian horde has departed, they have their sights on a gnarled old cherry tree. The grub around its exposed roots, roost in various positions at the base of its woodpecker-dimpled trunk, taste a few shriveled cherries that have fallen to the grass. (They seem to be practically measuring the place for draperies.)

Periodically, our resident male swan takes a break from nest building, and chases the geese off the water, with impossibly powerful strokes of his enormous webbed feet.

He overtakes them near the shore, and they retreat to the cherry tree.

The swan hurumphs himself out of the water, and charges toward them with his ungainly, but still frightening (and surprisingly speedy) gait.  Geese and swan charge through pine bowers and vineyard rows, but the geese are fleet on land, and the swan seems to know his strengths, so he never advances too far from the lake.

This goes on for hours, a pursuit by water, by air, and by land.

These placid geese seem mostly nonplussed, and the swan seems to realize he is mostly just making a point.

Eventually the geese will lay three or four large ovoid eggs in a nest of pine needles and down, at the base of the cherry tree. The swan will continue his aggression, ceasing sometime in June when his own mate is off her twiggy willow throne, and order will be restored to the peaceable avian kingdom.

Then the geese will sun themselves with the swans on the grassy lake shore on languid summer afternoons, the ducks hunkered and chortling amongst them, as they await the arrival of the winter hordes, and perhaps gossip just a little, about the mysterious crimson ducks, who came for just a few fleeting March days.