Poems by Eileen McLellan

Goose Season

by Eileen McLellan

From Canary Fall 2024

Eileen lives in the Chester River watershed, where rolling farmland meets the Chesapeake Bay. Most weekends you will find her hiking or kayaking in search of the rich bird life that migrates along the Atlantic Flyway.

Fall arrives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with the first cold front from the north. Overnight the sullen heat of late summer is swept away. In the morning, I open the windows, and feel the house – which has been holding its air-conditioned breath all summer – exhale. In the surrounding fields the cornstalks rattle as they dry. Only a month ago they stood triumphant, the soldiers of a conquering army; now they shiver in the wind, soon to fall beneath the blades of the combine. The fields that seemed no more than factories, planted and fertilized to specification, are reborn as habitats where wild things can live. I too can breathe again. The next night I hear the clamor of wild geese.

It’s as if they know that the landscape has been transformed for their delight. By day, they can feast on the leftover corn. When they have eaten their fill, they can loaf on the edges of the hundreds of farm ponds that speckle the landscape, glinting in the low sunlight. At night, seeking shelter from predators, they can retreat to the larger ponds, the tidewater creeks, and the tidal coves where the Chesapeake Bay embraces the land. For the next few months, the gabbling of geese is an ever-present soundtrack, a low but unceasing exchange of goose gossip occasionally punctuated by the more vigorous honks that accompany squabbles.

The geese seem to be the essence of wildness. In their honking and yelping I hear tales of a distant land, of arctic ice and arctic foxes, of midnight sun, of a wilderness where no people roam. For they are the Atlantic race of Canada Geese, and they have spent the summer on the tundra of the Ungava Peninsula of far northern Quebec.

And yet their arrival here in great numbers – some 500,000 geese winter in the region —follows changes in farming since the 1950s. In those days, the Eastern Shore produced milk, fruit and vegetables for Baltimore and other East Coast cities, but the loss of farm labor, the ready availability of artificial fertilizer and the post-war emphasis on economic efficiency helped drive a shift to today’s fields of corn and soybeans. It’s ironic that this vast area of productive farmland is in many ways a food desert, in the sense of growing vast amounts of food for animals (primarily chickens) raised elsewhere and very little food that local people can eat straight from the farm. The geese, of course, are oblivious to this.

On a grey morning in late November, I am jolted out of bed by the sound of gunshots. It takes a few minutes before I remember: goose season opens just before Thanksgiving, and I am living in what local boosters refer to as “the goose-hunting capital of North America”. Geese are big business here. I’ve heard it said that farming geese is more profitable than farming corn, and indeed thousands of acres of the landscape are managed to attract geese for hunting. Hunters tell me that nothing compares with sitting in a goose blind on a frosty November morning, waiting for the birds to descend on fluttering wings into the range of the gun. “It’s the moment I feel most alive”, one of them said.

A pity that a goose has to die for it.

As a volunteer bird rescuer, I see the other side of the story. Last year, in the days before Christmas, I got a call about an injured goose in someone’s backyard. “It’s just sitting there” said the homeowner, “and it doesn’t seem right”. When I arrive at her house, the goose has wedged itself into a corner of the fenced yard; it is half-sitting, half-lying, with its head and neck stretched out. A frightened, injured goose can be quite difficult to capture, but this one has no energy to resist. I throw a blanket over it, and as I’m bringing it up against me to check for wing damage, I realize that blood is streaming down the front of my jacket. That’s the moment when I realize that the goose has been shot.

It feels like it takes forever to bundle the goose into a transport crate, wrestle the crate into my car, and begin the drive to the bird hospital – an hour’s drive under good conditions, but with the roads crowded with holiday traffic I realize that this trip will take much longer. Not for the first time, I wish I had a flashing light and siren that would mark my car as being on a mission of mercy, an ambulance for which a route must be cleared. In the back of the car, the goose is making whimpering noises. As sad as they are to hear, I realize that silence would be worse. I’m not sure that this goose is going to survive the journey.

Although as a scientist I’m trained to believe that what matters most for the planet is overall biodiversity, and that survival of a species is more important than the fate of any individual creature, it’s hard to look at this goose and not see it as a being whose life is worth just as much as the human lives around me. And, because geese are strongly social, it’s probably some other goose’s mate, or mother, or father, or daughter, or son, and I picture them grieving for it. The world changes when you look at it through the eyes of a goose. I finally get to the hospital, and hand the bloody mess of bird and blanket over to the veterinary technicians. There is nothing more I can do. As I walk away, I hear one of them say “Clean shot”, which gives me some hope that this bird will survive.

As fall turns to winter, the geese adapt to being hunted. They quickly learn which fields are safe, and which are not, and they spend increasing amounts of time at the local wildlife refuge, where the fields have been planted with clover, and the tidal creeks are rich in underwater grasses. In the last week of January, as the end of goose season approaches, hunters become increasingly desperate, and the geese retreat deeper into the refuge. On the last day of the season, hunters are in a blind at the end of a spit of land only a few hundred yards from the refuge entrance. They are not allowed to shoot geese inside the refuge, but at the sound of every shot groups of geese rise into the air in panic. No doubt the hunters hope that some will drift over the refuge boundary and into range. But as the sun sets, and the hunters retrieve their decoys and put away their rifles, it seems as if every goose on the refuge takes to flight. Silhouetted against the red-streaked sky, hundreds of thousands of birds swirl in a maelstrom of beating wings, a vortex of birds that rises and then collapses, birds drifting down to reclaim the land and water in which they were so recently hunted.

Goose season ends much as it began, with a shift in the wind. In late February, the birds become restless, days and nights filled with goose hubbub as they wait for a wind from the south. At sunset on the first day that speaks of spring rather than winter, they begin to leave, turning towards the north, flying in family parties of ten to twenty birds. I hear their calls all through the night, and by sunrise the next day only a few stragglers remain. The fields and marshes are silent. Goose season is over for another year.