Take a Gander at This Reason to Be Thankful

I was puttering around outside this past Sunday when a flock of geese flew low overhead.

Squinting at the size of the massive birds, I suddenly became thankful that geese are waterfowl and not treefowl like robins or cardinals.

Imagine if the thousands of geese that take up residence in this area for at least part of the year acted like those significantly smaller birds.

If you think the ice storms of this past winter were devastating, consider what would happen if geese -- equivalent in numbers to the thousands of black birds that seem to congregate year-round in the fields at the south end of Siemers Drive -- suddenly decided that electric lines were a fine place to roost?

I'm not sure how many big-butted birds it would take to pull down a power-line or snap a utility pole, but I bet it's not too many since an average goose weighs between 6 and 14 pounds.

And while the remnants of an ice storm typically melt after a day or two, once the geese find a place they like, they tend to stay there for quite a while. So after they snapped one power-line, they would just find another and another and another until we would all be huddled around makeshift fires attempting to keep warm hoping the infernal birds would go back to the depths of whatever Hell they came from.

Don't think the geese would just limit their destruction to our electric infrastructure. If they were treefowl, they would also be roosting in every oak, maple and elm they could fit their behinds into.

While the sound of hundred-year-old tree branches exploding out of dead silence under the weight of ice is very ominous, imagine if it was followed by the squawking of several hundred geese upset that they just lost their roost for the night.

For those reasons, I'm very thankful that geese are not treefowl.

My friend Ernie has no use for geese. Ernie is a Serious Golfer. While geese are a pest to most golfers, they're the Spawn of Satan to Serious Golfers. You see geese love to hang around golf courses fowling greens in search of food and defecating "goose bombs" all over the place.

But while some people -- like Serious Golfers -- despise the birds, others celebrate them. Locally, the most visible sign of geese glorification can be found in Capaha Park and on the campus of Southeast Hospital

The hospital has created a sculpture garden -- Nature's Landing is what they call it -- that blends the public and private properties together using perennial landscaping and 75 stylized steel geese shown in flight with varying wing patterns.

Not long ago I was riding with Ernie by the hospital and he started grumbling as he always does when he sees a goose of any kind -- feathery and fat or still and made of steel.

"Damn geese. They're not even that tasty. And then the hospital has to ruin a perfectly good park, beautifying it with these steel geese. The sculpture is not even accurate. They forgot something, but I'm gonna fix it."

"What are you talking about," I asked Ernie as he pulled off onto Perryville Road and parked.

He then reached behind the seat and pulled out a coffee can full of old rusty massive tractor bolts, each of them 3 and 4 inches long and at least an inch in diameter. He then strolled over to the landscaping and started scattering the bolts beneath the steel birds.

His actions suddenly made sense. I knew what was missing from the sculpture garden.

Goose bombs.