Million geese flock to mid-missouri

The link above is to our local television station.

I was awakened Sunday night by a familiar sound from my childhood. It was a sound I hadn't heard in several decades. I got up and went to the front door and opened it to make sure I wasn't just dreaming. Nope.Unmistakably, it was the sound of migrating snow geese. The sky was so dark that I couldn't see them but their incessant "honking" was a dead "giveaway." And I wasn't the only one awakened by the sound. It seems that the local fire department and police were being flooded with calls. Curious thing, that, "I hear a goose so let's call the fire brigade!"

Snow geese migrate across Missouri twice each year but they usually are confined to a corridor considerably west of where I live--perhaps seventy-five to one hundred miles west of here. As a child I lived in that corridor so the sound was familiar--yet different. The sound seemed much larger than when I was a kid which is generally the opposite of what happens when I revisit my childhood; the old school, the old house, the old playground all seem so much smaller now than they do in my childhood memories.

Snow geese are social creatures sending "honks" instead of tweets as they travel together in a perpetual, feathery, rush hour traffic-jam. They migrate in the thousands--in the tens of thousands and I've seen the sky almost darkened as they set out in the early morning light. They sometimes fly throughout the night and when they do decide to rest it may not be a lake, a river, a marsh or otherwise aquatic, "bed and breakfast" establishment. Sometimes it's just an open field, large enough to accommodate fifteen or twenty thousand.

The picture above was taken near Squaw Creek on the western side of Missouri and near the western edge of their normal north-south corridor.

Anyway, back to Sunday night. We awoke Monday morning to learn that local bird experts were perplexed by what we had heard and seen during the night saying that it was unprecedented. Using local radar experts estimated that as many as 800,000 or 1,000,000 (one million) snow geese had flown overhead during the night. What's more, radar indicated that they weren't just a tad off course but that the skies were crowded all the way across the western half of Missouri. Perhaps there were so many this year that they were forced to widen the road--so to speak--pushing as many as a million geese eastward to pass over our unsuspecting heads.

Our local TV station posted a couple of Facebook snapshots of the sound and "flurry."

What does it mean? I don't know. But I'm sure my grandmother would have read some kind of meaning into it particularly regarding the approaching winter season. "Animals know..." she would say.

updated by @harold-powell: 11/11/15 10:38:30PM