Geese at Country Park in Greensboro

Crying Fowl

The waterfowl pond at the rehab center is dry now. I no longer hear the geese honking as I walk past to feed the barred owls in the big flight cage across the footbridge. The silence on a humid, August afternoon is bearable only because I know they’ve returned to the wild. And, I hope, won’t need our help ever again.
It’s the ones you can’t help that haunt you.
In May we had a call from a man in Greensboro who had a gosling that had been hit by a car.
It was a glorious Sunday afternoon: blue skies, sunshine, the smell of fresh-mown grass in the air. Traffic had stopped on Battleground Avenue to allow three adult geese and about a dozen goslings cross the street near Wal-Mart. When the goslings were in the middle of the road, a teenager behind the wheel of a car gunned the engine and plowed into them. Several goslings were killed outright. The man saw this one was injured, but alive
Usually we don’t go out to pick up injured animals at the rehab center. We don’t have the resources. But the man who called couldn’t get it to us. You see, he’s homeless, living with his wife in a wooded area along Battleground.
He had made four other phone calls trying to get help for the gosling before he called the rehab center. When I arrived to pick it up, the gosling was in a cardboard box and his wife was fussing over it, making soft cooing sounds as though talking to a baby.
“If I had a gun,” the man said, “I would have shot them for what they done. Those geese never hurt anybody.”
I doubt he would have shot anyone. He’d already shown more humanity than the teens in the car.
The gosling was alert. Occasionally it waggled its tail and made a hissing sound. The black marks of the tire were visible across its back. Still, I held out hope, just maybe, it would survive.
Its injuries were too severe. It was euthanized the next morning. Sometimes that’s the only gift we have to give a suffering animal.
Walking past the waterfowl pond, I think, too, of all the geese that made it this season, that survived man’s cruelty: the gunshot wounds, the broken wings, the poisoning from the pollutants we put in the water.
I like to think of them gliding across a pond somewhere, their honking like laughter ringing through the air.