WILD GEESE 'What about wild geese?' asks a friend who
writes in reply to my modest list of birds heard in the night. I can't think how I could have forgotten geese, for I spent a good part of my childhood in a place that was on their flight line. In the early days of winter the migrants came down from the north. Some- times they arrived by day, but often they came in the night and I would stir and rise on my elbow in bed to hear the call of the wild flock. Another reader draws my attention to the omission, saying, 'You have missed out the most gallant and glorious of all bird notes from your list—the honk of fighting geese. A string of these migrants crying through the dark would halt angels to listen.' The angels listened when I was a boy, I am sure, but so did the loungers who propped the walls at various corners of the town, and they would fade from the scene in the hope of shooting a goose. They were usually armed with an assortment of very ancient weapons, some of which were as capable of maiming their owners as of bringing down a greylag.
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