A few days ago I heard a familiar honking sound at twilight
and looked up to see a skein of geese heading north-west. The sight of a single
skein flying north or north-west is something I see once nearly every autumn,
and is one of the most iconic of seasonal signals. The combination of sight and
sound, taken together with what it represents in the annual cycle, always
causes a slight inner shiver.
And then last night the same thing happened and a second skein flew overhead. That’s unusual, but I have seen a second passage two or three times since I’ve lived here.
But tonight I heard the honking a third time. Flying overhead were four separate skeins, each consisting of ten to twenty birds and arranged in a diamond formation. That is most certainly unprecedented and added yet another first to this year’s growing list. And the majority of them involved birds.
And so I ask again: do the birds, supposedly harbingers of notable events, know something we don’t? My imaginative faculty says ‘probably.’ My rational half prefers ‘maybe.’
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