As much as I despise the Canadian winter for making my depressive episodes worse. There’s something about having a spring where the piles of snow recede and the plants tucked snuggly under their insulating blanket start to stir.

Some time between late March and early April it will happen. Spring here is a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ affair. No one knows exactly when but we know it’s coming. The anticipation is thick, in every weather report and in the strange and occult rituals we perform on supposedly immortal groundhogs.

But by far my favourite part of spring is the assurance that the goose are on their way. They tear their way up the continental United States, heading north to their seasonal breeding grounds. Eggs become chicks, hatchlings, goslings, and by first snow, the Canadian geese have bolstered their numbers and turn their black, heartless eyes south, ready to lay siege to every golf course and every other water-wasting stretch of maintained grass from here to Mexico.

Geese were once on the brink of extinction, but when they ditched their native swampland in favour of city parks and the aforementioned golf corses, they found that people were less likely to shoot at them and that the transplanted English grass viewed as a status symbol in the very same country that fought for independence made a delicious treat.