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Screaming down out of the great white north, a snow goose comes in for a landing. One of thousands of birds heading south for the winter she is usually accompanied by the rest of her clan and the clan by the flock and the flocks by each other until the sky is filled to the horizons with birds. They literally darken the sky as they come in to feed at the cornfields and settle in to the ponds for the night.

When I was young, way last century, my maternal grandmother would yell at us kids out the back door “You kids knock it off you sound like a bunch of banshees”. We never knew what banshees were, unless they were a bunch of 8 and 9 year old kids that yelled a lot but we also knew that the razor strap hung on the nail next to the key that never locked the back door so we’d quiet down for a while.

When the snow geese are coming in they must be the banshees that my grandmother yelled about. The sounds they make are incredible and constant and fill the air until you can’t hear anything else. Your very skin seems to resonate with the sound. At sunset when they’re returning to the ponds and filling them with their bodies until it would be impossible for one more bird to land they keep up a constant volume of noise that must soothe them just through being exposed to the standing waves of the sound. Kind of like an audible massage.

The next morning when the magic of the ascension happens the thousands upon thousands of geese lift into the air in unison and at first all you hear is the soft gentle thunder of their wing beats that gets louder and louder as they start to pass over you. They lift off just moments before the sun comes over the hills surrounding the ponds and as the first rays strike them they begin to call in what can only be a song of celebration of a new day.

Banshees or not it is a sound I have come to love and believe that everyone should hear once, although it’s probably a good thing for the geese that my grandmother wasn’t along though.