Graylags

African safaris advertise their ability to expose you to the "big five."  If you don't get your lions, elephants, zebras, giraffes, or whatever the big five are (hippo? wildebeest? rhino? meerkat?), your safari just isn't complete. 

At the duck pond, my personal big five are the ducks, the coots, the solitary mute swan, some random fourth bird (the cormorants? an egret? a heron? the gulls?) and the geese.  The geese, for me, are the sine qua non.  And I'm not talking about the Canda Geese.  The Canda Geese are too pretty and elegant.  They gracefully glide around looking cooler than everyone else.  They're habituated to humans, but still essentially migratory wild birds.  No, for me the duck pond's true geese are the domestics. The Graylags (aka Greylags) and the Swan Geese. 

Bigger than most toddlers, equally bad-mannered, pushy, loud, demanding, messy, foul - the domestic geese are the duck pond. 

Pictured here are the Graylags.  I know, "The Graylags" sounds like a gang, and that's essentially what they are.  They usually hang out near, but not with, the Swan Geese.  They look and sound exactly like Goose from the 1973 Hanna-Barbera version of Charlotte's Web.  They are very vocal and usually pretty friendly.  And when they don't like you, they'll lower their long necks, open those big orange bills, and hiss at you, their little jagged tongues quivering furiously.  When they do like you they'll bite you.

Anyway, I love 'em.

Graylag Geese, taken March 14, 2010, around 4:30 p.m. at the duck pond on my iPhone. I looked them up a long time ago, I think in the National Geographic guide.