Wild Geese

It is still unclear where the teenager picked it up, although public health officials say genetic sequences shows it’s closely related to a virus found in wild geese in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley.

He was doing “The Wild Geese,” I remember, down in Tshipise in South Africa, and you’d get this message that your father was on the house master’s telephone.

A 2022 study of wild geese in Europe found that during crucial rest stops on their long migrations, many birds abandoned their sleeping sites on New Year’s Eve.

“An immense body of wild geese whose wings and cries as they moved from place to place caused this kind of roaring noise,” wrote Charles Nordhoff, a New York journalist who penned one of the first travel books about California in 1873.

As part of that all keepers must house their birds indoors to try to limit the spread of the disease but that is simply not an option with the wild geese.