Canada geese have a reputation that could be summed up with an angry bird hiss.
Some consider them the place where polite Canadians place their anger. Others joke they're the result of an unholy union between cobras and chickens.
That's part of what makes Brad Walsh's experience so unusual. The English tourist was visiting Vancouver's English Bay Beach on his first trip ever to the city. Along the route, he came across a "horde" of Canada geese.
"I keep walking further up the beach and geese are coming up to me," he tells V.I.A. "I thought 'Am I about to get attacked?'"
However, he didn't really feel threatened, Walsh explains, more like he was being encouraged to walk up to a 'U' shaped frame in the ground ahead of him, which he eventually realized was a beach shower for people coming out of the seawater.
"There must have been 100 geese around me and they all stood by the shower," he says, noting that while the geese were crowded around him, people were giving him and his followers a wide berth.
"I thought: 'Well, I want to turn this on because they're stood there,'" Walsh says. "They were stood there for a reason."
When he finally did turn on the shower, the geese got excited, standing under the stream, drinking up the fresh water, and flapping about.
"I'm a goose whisperer!" he exclaims in the video he recorded during the encounter.
And every time he tried to walk away it seemed more geese showed up looking for the water, which only stays on if someone holds down the button.
"One goose stood right under the shower and had a sit-down," Walsh says. "He just sat down being showered."
Walsh ended up standing and showering the birds for several minutes; he ended up recording much of it for his YouTube channel. While he's put a lot of effort into some videos, he notes a 30-second reel of him and the geese has been his most viewed recent clip.
"It's a real stand-out moment," he says of the "funny, magical" experience.
Are geese getting people to shower them?
It's not the first time Canada geese have been spotted under the showers at a Vancouver beach, so are local geese looking for humans to treat them to some cool water?
"It would be hard to say for sure," says Dr. David Bird, emeritus professor of wildlife biology and Director of the Avian Science and Conservation Centre of McGill University. "I've never heard of this behaviour before in Canada geese."
More likely, Bird says, is that the geese saw a person walking towards the showers. Since they know humans turn on the showers and that the showers are a source of fresh water, they followed and surrounded Walsh in the hopes he'd turn it on, but without the intention of encouraging him to turn it on.
"I'm very certain that those [geese] were associating the man with turning on the water to get water themselves," Bird says. "But I'm not sure they were herding him."
Where do geese rank on the 'smarts meter' among bird peers?
While some birds do communicate with humans, Canada geese haven't been recorded as doing such.
"Hummingbirds will actually let you know when the feeder needs filling and blue jays have been known to tap on the window," he says. "Canada geese on the smarts meter aren't the smartest...but they're not the dumbest. These geese would rank in the top third."
That said, the friendliness of the geese in this instance is odd, according to Bird.
A Canada goose can be a menace, explains Bird. While most people are afraid of their teeth, he notes that that's not really a goose's weapon of choice.
They prefer to use their wings.
"The way they flick [a wing] forward, it's quite capable of breaking your forearm," he says, explaining that's how they fight off things like foxes.
On most beaches, geese would be considered a menace, he adds.
"They are basically pooping machines," he says, which can be a health hazard at beaches that people use.
Geese can also be scary for young children, and a source for bird phobias.
"They just don't mix with humans very easily," Bird adds.
This is why the interaction with Walsh is interesting; he doesn't get the angry cobra-chicken experience many associate with Canada geese.
"It's been such a positive little thing," Walsh says of the experience.
