As a helicopter makes its approach to the hospital next door, I find myself thinking of geese. The pressure wave from the copter’s blade makes the canopy of trees rustle. The sound of the motor and whirring blade? My eardrums sense it as percussion. The pressure feels the same to me as bass notes at a rock concert. But why does a helicopter make me think of geese? Because both are capable of hovering when landing?

The pressure in my ears expresses throughout my body. Then I remember that day at Bombay Hook on Delaware Bay. Have you ever stood beneath a cloud of snow geese and thought you could feel the beat of their wings as they hovered above you, about to land? The air pressure created by uncountable geese—hundreds? How many geese does it take to make a cloud? Maybe it’s a trick, the sound of collective wingbeats interpreted as a pressure wave. Maybe it’s the sheer noise the flock makes. One naturalist claims snow geese are the noisiest waterfowl. Another compares the sound of a migrating flock to a pack of baying hounds. More than just quack or honk, snow geese emit shrill cries. I’d compare the sound they make to a schoolyard of children at recess.

…the air pressure from a flock of geese can be felt in the eardrums or on the human observer’s skin.

A graduate student holding an air-pressure sensor could probably tell me whether the air pressure from a flock of geese can be felt in the eardrums or on the human observer’s skin. But maybe I don’t want to know. We may live in a data-driven world, but I like to turn off my phone when I’m out hiking or birdwatching, immersing myself in nature and embracing senses grown dormant from making a living seated in front of a computer screen. Even as an engineer I’ve spent more time at a screen than in the field kicking actual rocks, sighting a line along a surveyor’s transit, seeing the actual problem to be solved, a leaking acid pond at an abandoned copper mine, or a creek tinted red from iron unearthed at the mine.

If you had told me that day at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge that the flock of snow geese I sensed as one body resonating with my own was not hundreds, but thousands, of geese, I wouldn’t have been surprised. My wife at the time, and I, standing together beneath the cloud of geese hovering fifty feet off the ground, were newlyweds holding hands. We often did that when watching a spectacle of nature—one of the few things we had in common. Before the pressure wave could be felt on the ground, we had watched the geese descend, tumbling in flight in what is called a maple leaf maneuver, so named after the behavior of falling leaves. That autumn day on Delaware Bay we had braved the cold to watch the migration of snow geese along the Atlantic Flyway, the north-south migratory route between Eastern South America and Eastern Canada. The geese needed to periodically land, rest, and feed in the fields and marshes during the day, to prepare for the long, distant flights they made overnight. Flocks typically arrived at Bombay Hook in October on their way to South America. Staff at the wildlife refuge have recorded seasonal counts of up to two hundred thousand snow geese.

If helicopters make me think of geese, then geese make me think of bird strikes. Many years after my wife and I stood in that field at Bombay Hook, watching geese safely land, a more dramatic event happened: the landing of the U.S. Airways jet on the Hudson River. In January 2009, Flight 1549 struck a flock of Canada Geese on takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York City, disabling the twin jet engines. Captain Sully Sullenberger successfully landed the plane in the Hudson River, and remarkably, no human lives were lost. We can assume a number of Canada Geese, however, were killed in the incident, shredded as they passed through the engines.

I’ve always been a little afraid of flying, and the knowledge that a bird strike could bring down a jet airliner doesn’t help.

I’ve always been a little afraid of flying, and the knowledge that a bird strike could bring down a jet airliner doesn’t help. Whenever I leave the ground, whether a passenger on a ski-lift or in a jet, my stomach tries to stay on the ground. The day I stood in that field at Bombay Hook, it hadn’t occurred to me that a flock of geese—Snow, Canada, or otherwise—could disrupt air traffic—human air traffic—the only traffic our species thinks counts. We automatically think our species should have the right of way at any intersection of life. Geese migrate along fairly narrow corridors—in this case, the Atlantic Flyway—with habitual or conditioned stopping points along the way, such as wetlands now called National Wildlife Refuges. Perhaps the refuges save not only geese, but jet airliners, by providing space for the birds to navigate around concrete gray urban corridors to find green fields and open water.

Migrating snow geese fly in long, diagonal lines, and in V-formations, at altitudes of up to 7,500 feet. It’s not unusual for a jet airliner to reach altitudes of 35,000 feet. A migrating flock of snow geese typically measures in the thousands. Of course, the human species is constantly migrating from one place to another, from New York to Boston, from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, et cetera, on personal or business travel, and we undertake seasonal migration in great masses during the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. The American Automobile Association tracks travel trends, and in a typical year, seven million Americans have flown to their destinations during the Christmas holidays. Estimates of the number of commercial airplanes in the sky at any given time range up to ten thousand.

Given how many of our cities are located on water, and given flocks of geese also find water convenient for their civilization, I’m surprised every day doesn’t bring a close call or actual bird strike. Maybe it does. Maybe the close calls have become commonplace. Actual bird strikes, when aircraft and birds meet in the air, are supposed to be reported to the Federal Aviation Administration. Current estimates range around forty bird strikes on commercial aircraft per day. Of course, we call them bird strikes rather than bird-aircraft interactions by way of representing the human-centric nature of our language. Do the geese think jet strike when one or more of their companions are sucked into a jet engine? Presumably most geese have encountered, at least from a distance, our fast-flying aluminum-skinned birds during their lifetimes.

We often ask of some phenomenon—when did it begin? The very first air strike is associated with the first human flight, as undertaken by Orville and Wilbur Wright. In his diary entry for September 7, 1905, Orville reported that a bird struck his aircraft over a cornfield in Dayton, Ohio. While Orville didn’t identify the species, the United States Department of Agriculture presumes it was a flock of red-winged blackbirds, common in cornfields throughout the continental United States. In the early days of human flight, red-winged blackbirds must have been surprised to find a previously unknown species, larger than they had ever seen before, taking to the sky. They would have been well served to listen to their instinctual warning systems that may have said of the aircraft—predator.

Interestingly, the U.S. military has an aircraft called the Predator, a long-distance remotely piloted aircraft (essentially a drone) capable of gathering data and firing missiles. The Predator has a reported ceiling at which it can fly, of 25,000 feet. Although, it’s relatively slow for an aircraft, with a top speed of roughly 135 miles per hour (in contrast to a commercial jet airliner’s typical cruising speed of 500 miles per hour). The aircraft really does look like a predator, to my eye a massive praying mantis. However, it’s safe to say, given that commercial aircraft outnumber military aircraft, most bird deaths in the air are not caused by the Predator.

It’s not that the human species is completely numb to the collision of geese and commercial aircraft, in which the geese usually die in greater numbers. Human deaths, though rare in bird-aircraft interactions, make front-page news. This makes a fear of flying understandable. What comes naturally to geese does not come so naturally to the human species. In October 1960 an Eastern Airlines flight out of Boston struck a flock of starlings and the plane crashed, resulting in 62 human deaths. Given the potential for loss of life, airports go to great lengths to scare away birds, using such methods as trained dogs, fake (plastic or stuffed) birds of prey, real live birds of prey (such as hawks or falcons), even corpses of birds.

…the cloud of snow geese, loose down falling on my parka, and the feathers made me think of snow, and snow angels.

That day at Bombay Hook, I stood beneath the cloud of snow geese, loose down falling on my parka, and the feathers made me think of snow, and snow angels. I felt far from threatened despite the large numbers of both geese and airplanes in the air that day, crying out and droning, both impressive. Later that day, when I felt the pressure wave of the helicopter in my neighborhood, I realized it was trying to help, not harm, carrying a patient in desperate need to the hospital. What comes naturally to geese requires propellers or jet engines for us. A snow goose muscles itself into flight and simply goes, carefree, no carry-on luggage. But back to that cloud of snow geese still hovering in memory. Call it awe or something else, I was speechless as I held hands with my wife beneath that cloud. It was not a dark cloud. To my poet’s mind the white down, falling, was exactly the stuff of which angel wings would be made. And when it comes to flight, I’m keeping an open mind.

Dave Seter is a civil engineer, poet, and nature writer. He is the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag). His writing has appeared in various journals, including Appalachia, Confluence, The Hopper, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. www.daveseter.com.