At dusk, with cars moving fast through a notoriously busy intersection, Carrie stepped into the road. The geese were not going to make it on their own, and she knew it. Canada geese cannot fly between early June and early August, a window that leaves entire families stranded at ground level in the middle of suburban traffic, and this particular crossing had no margin for error.
Why these geese had nowhere else to go
Urbanization has quietly erased the buffer zones that once kept wildlife away from high-speed roads. As one of the wildlife helpers on the scene observed, ‘We keep taking away their habitats and then we get mad when they’re going into our street.’ The geese were not behaving strangely. They were simply trying to move through territory that used to belong to them.
The flightless period compounds the danger. Without the option to lift off and clear the asphalt, an adult goose and its goslings must walk every inch of a crossing that offers drivers almost no reaction time, especially at dusk when visibility is already shrinking.
Carrie steps into the intersection
The plan was improvised and fast. Carrie moved to the side of the intersection to face oncoming traffic and hold the lane while her partner pushed the family of geese from behind. The family was steered diagonally, cutting straight through the center of the intersection rather than taking the longer path along the curb.
‘Oh, my heart was pounding the entire time,’ said the person working alongside her. A bystander who watched the whole thing put it simply: ‘I think most people don’t think how dangerous this work is, but I see you and I’m like, wow, this woman is like fearless.’
What happened next was not guaranteed. A busy intersection at dusk, a diagonal crossing, geese that cannot be herded on a schedule, and a steady stream of drivers who had no warning. That particular night, every car stopped. The family crossed without incident.
‘It went so perfectly,’ Carrie said afterward. ‘Kind of like gives me hope for humanity.’
The simplest version of the same thing
Carrie’s ask for anyone who encounters a goose family mid-road is not complicated. Stop the car. Wait. The geese will move. That is the whole instruction.
For anyone who wants to go further, the work of crossing wild animals through urbanized intersections is ongoing and unglamorous, carried out in the gaps between rush-hour traffic by people who understand that the birds are not an inconvenience but a consequence.
The goslings, somewhere in the middle of the crossing
The goslings, small enough to disappear between car tires, moving at their own unhurried pace through the center of a live intersection while Carrie held the lane.
If, as Carrie put it, everyone could see them through her eyes, the calculation at a crosswalk would look entirely different.
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