Geese Falling From Cedars

A new thought: maybe the best yardstick to measure the bounty of our land is the number of eggs it produces.

Eggs of wild birds. If birds not only find it a nice place to hang out, but also know they can source the enormous amount of food it takes to raise youngsters, we should feel pretty good about our land’s function in the larger peninsula ecosystem.

And yet, for all the work we put in to restore habitat, plant natives, add dead wood, boost insect populations — sometimes the nests appear in the darnedest places.

A large two-trunked cedar stands just outside my bedroom window. Half the tree is the picture of health. The other half, which leaned toward the house, was cut at least a decade ago. It was cut flat, 11 feet off the ground, higher than a basketball hoop. Cedar being cedar, rot is minimal, confined to a small hollow at the center of the platform.

That is where, early in April, a Canada goose appeared and settled in. Day after day, my wife and children and I have watched her up there, a goose in a tree, strange as a squirrel in a lake. “Goose report,” my daughter says each morning. “Still there.”

Female geese do all the incubating. The males patrol for intruders, though in this case, we hardly see him. The nest couldn’t be much safer. But how will the goslings get down? asks everyone who sees the situation. We shake our heads and shrug.

On May Day, at last, her stoic pose breaks. She bends her head into the hollow to clean or help something down there. That evening, the first gosling totters around the edge of the platform.

Morning dawns full of honking. My daughter and I scramble from our beds. The male has appeared in the pasture grass at the base of the tree. His neck is extended. The female has a piece of down in her beak and seems restless. Geese do not bring food to their young in the nest. Goslings are born able to walk, swim, and graze.

At 7 a.m., the mother has the goslings up. There are four.

Then, without preamble, she crouches next to the cedar’s other trunk. She raises her wings and goes over the edge, awkwardly using the crotch between the trunks as a sort of slide. It takes us a moment to realize what she has just done. There will be no pushing of goslings out of the tree. She has demonstrated what she expects, and now they must follow.

Alone up there, they look at each other and seem to ask, We’re supposed to do what now?

Then one is falling.

It is one of the most surreal things I have seen. My eyes do not accept the blink of yellow as a falling baby until I see it on the ground.

The next one comes. This time I see it more clearly. As soon as it begins to fall, its infant body locks in a rigid spread-eagle, black feet and stubs of wings held out like the immobile points of a star, and it comes down in an arc defined not by biology but physics — heck, maybe astronomy.

We watch the last two fall. I am stunned. They lie on the ground for a moment before they roll to their feet. They sniff at the grass. They begin to walk. No sign of injury. They are downy and probably as light as empty cans. The parents make no move to rush their first explorations. They bracket the goslings and walk with them, over the next hour, toward the pond.

I think of the windy fall days when migratory geese arrive, how they cant their wings expertly to take aim at our pond, how sometimes they will do a barrel roll or two before they flash to a skidding stop on the water.

The contrast to the falling goslings could not be more striking.

Sixty years ago, you would be hard-pressed to find a Canada goose in Washington. Their population boom has been startling. It is a story of increasing habitat, especially in suburban areas and irrigated farmland. They are tundra-nesting, grass-eating birds that like open spaces next to water. But there is more to it than that.

Eleven subspecies of Canada geese exist, each with a different nesting range and subtle differences in size, structure, and coloration. In 2004, the American Ornithologists Union split the generally smaller northern birds into a separate species, the cackling goose. So now we have honkers and cacklers.

One of the largest subspecies, Moffitt’s Canada goose, was reintroduced along the West Coast in the 1960s. It adapted well, mixed with other transplant geese, and learned to tolerate people. It grew flexible in its nesting habits. It did not migrate like its cousins. These are the geese now ubiquitous in parks and golf courses.

But in the fall, they are joined by their wild cousins, down from Canada and Alaska. On the Key Peninsula, we might see six subspecies of migratory geese. Look for the tiny minima cackling goose, barely bigger than a mallard. Or if you are feeling lucky, look for the endangered dusky Canada goose, whose population was nearly eliminated when the 1964 Good Friday earthquake lifted the Copper River Delta and made its nesting habitat accessible to predators.

Canada geese mate for life. They nest on islands, at tree bases, along shorelines, in marshes, and even in unoccupied osprey nests. My favorite is when they nest atop beaver lodges. The goslings cannot fly for their first 10 weeks. They stay with their parents for the first year or so. Their migratory patterns are not innate and must be learned alongside parents and flock mates. In suburban areas, mortality of goslings is low thanks to abundant food and the scarcity of predators.

Our pasture is a little more wild than your average suburban park. It wasn’t more than a year ago that we saw young coyotes tumbling where the goslings now make their first trip to the pond.

In the evening, golden light comes through a gap in the forest to the west. I peer across our pasture, wishing I could know how the goslings’ first day went. I see a spreading golden vee of ripples in the flooded pasture. Squinting, I make out a family swimming my way. With binoculars I look and — oh, they are mallards.

With tiny ducklings.

Where was that nest hidden?