Geese flying overhead
Geese flying overhead are often heard before they are seen, since migrating flocks call back and forth to stay together, day and night. In Yorkshire those cries in the dark became the legend of the Gabriel hounds.
What it may mean
A skein passing over at night keeps up a running exchange of calls, and the sound is eerie enough that people in Yorkshire built a legend on it: the Gabriel hounds, a ghostly pack sweeping through the sky. Inside many of those flocks fly families. Young Canada geese often stay with their parents through their first year, so many make their first long journey beside birds that know the route. Nobody hands them a map; the young learn much of the way simply by keeping up. People learn hard journeys like that too: a first job beside a patient colleague, a first winter abroad next to a neighbor who has done it, a first baby with a sister who had hers two years earlier. In Normandy, by contrast, people paid more attention to numbers: a big flock was good fortune.
Depending on how you saw it
Honking over the house after dark
Geese migrate at night as well as by day, and a flock can pass over a sleeping town calling all the while. Some people get up and go to the window; others lie still and listen. When something passes over you in the dark, which kind of person are you?
Heading southeast in the fall
In Kansas, wild geese flying to the southeast in the fall meant a blizzard was coming. The flight south was read as a forecast. Which warning in your calendar do you actually act on, rather than only mention?
Geese that never leave the park
Many Canada geese now spend the whole year on golf courses and city ponds where food and open water never run out, and no longer migrate at all. What did you once leave every year that you now simply stay through?
Why it happens in nature
Geese migrate in long lines and V shapes, and each bird gains lift from the air rising off the wingtips of the bird ahead. They often fly at night and call constantly, which keeps the flock in contact and makes a passing skein audible long before or after it is seen. Young geese often stay with their parents through their first year, and migrating flocks include family groups. Many Canada geese now live year-round in parks and suburbs.
What folk beliefs say
England (Yorkshire)
The honking of wild geese at night, a 1903 collection says, is held to be the basis of the Yorkshire legend of the Gabriel hounds, a ghostly pack that sweeps through the air in full cry.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 639. View the page
Kansas (United States)
When wild geese fly to the southeast in the fall in Kansas, the same collection says, expect a blizzard.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 639. View the page
France (Normandy)
In Piron, in Normandy, it was a sign of great good fortune when wild geese came there in large numbers.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 639. View the page
To reflect on
Which hard road did you learn by traveling it beside someone who had been that way before?