Illustration by Rania Abdallah
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If, over the past few years, you had found yourself at the foot of West Street in Kingston, by the boat launch, you would have seen a colossal quackery of ducks, a lesser gaggle of Canada geese, and a lone callipygian standout with an orange beak and greyish-brown feathers (although “greyish-brown” is an inadequate descriptor for the bird’s luxuriantly hued plumage; Benjamin Moore would probably have named the colour “caramelized marshmallow”). He was lone but not alone, for this standout goose had seemingly been adopted by the Canada geese.
I learned from several Reddit threads that this goose’s name was Hank. Or Gary. Or Hankgary. He was described as a greylag goose, but more authoritative online sources note that wild greylags are rare in North America and that most domesticated geese are descendants of greylags. Although Hank/Gary/Hankgary – I’ll refer to him as “Hank” from now on – could have been what Wikipedia refers to as a “vagrant greylag,” then, more likely he came from a farm. I liked to imagine that he flew the coop while the farmers were watching Duck Dynasty.
On land, Hank had a cocksure way about him. I never saw him airborne, but someone told me Hank couldn’t keep up with the Canada geese and would wobble in their wake, honking plaintively.
Hank was often surrounded by a coterie of admirers and curious passers-by who wanted a closer gander at him. He also had his detractors: on one Reddit thread, MrFurious2023 claimed that Hank tried to rip his arm off, which sounds like a canard. (And yes, the puns would have been punnier if Hank had been a duck.) HauntingMarsupial had this to say: “Last time I saw him he stole my bag of cheetos and swam away, sitting just out of arms reach eating them and staring me right in the eye.” The Redditor then referred to Hank using a slur that can’t be printed in this paper. Nari_on_safari claimed that Hank was a bit of a bully toward the smaller ducks.
I am a volunteer dog walker for a chihuahua-shih tzu mix named Charlie who lives near the boat launch. It was through those walks that I became a Hank devotee. I worried when Hank disappeared during the unusually cold winter of 2024-25. Lake Ontario froze over as far as the eye could see. It was too late in the season for him to have migrated, even supposing Hank could fly great distances. When I asked some waterfront regulars about Hank, they said he had taken refuge by the sewage treatment plant. Something about the plant’s operations prevents lake ice from forming around the building.
Come mid-April, Hank hadn’t returned to the boat launch. Later that month I went to the Netherlands (where I spotted many Hank doppelgangers, although they were presumably actual greylags and were so abundant, they lacked his star power). When I returned and started walking Charlie again, Hank was still nowhere to be seen. I asked Charlie’s human if she had seen Hank.
“He died. When my neighbour told me, we both started crying.”
“Oh no! Did he freeze to death?”
“No, he was back at the boat launch a few weeks ago but didn’t seem to be doing too well. Someone brought him to a wildlife rescue but they couldn’t save him. They think he had avian flu.”
I have had my heart broken many times by the death of many pets, but I didn’t share a house with Hank. I was surprised, then, at how bereft I felt over his demise. By comparison, the news of several mass goose die-offs due to avian flu this past year did not elicit nearly as much of an emotional response. In elementary school, a teacher once asked the class which event would affect us more: the death of an elephant at the local zoo, or the death of 1,000 elephants in a geographically distant land. Although most of us surely knew that one was far less than 1,000, most of us said we would be more saddened by the local elephant’s death. The numbers game is a 98-pound/44.45-kilogram weakling in the tug-of-war against our micro-worlds’ heartstrings.
Hank was more than a silly goose. He was a community builder. Perhaps that loss magnified my sorrow: We certainly need more builder-uppers to counter the growing influence of those who seem hell-bent on killing every goose that ever laid a golden egg.
RIP, Hank. You are missed (except perhaps by MrFurious2023, HauntingMarsupial, and the smaller ducks).
Helen Coo lives in Kingston.