If geese grew on trees
WETLAND and waterside folk knew about ducks, geese and swans—how they paired, nested and produced eggs and fledglings. There was, however, one notable exception: a medium-sized adult goose with a white face and a black neck, which appeared annually without the usual evidence of propagation. Imaginative ancestors made a logical assumption when they came across timbers floating in from the sea, with small creatures each attached by means of a grey-black foot. This they likened to the neck of that black-and-white goose and reasoned that this barnacle must be the earliest stage of its development.
The theory entered literature., an Anglo-Saxon poetic relic, posed this conundrum: ‘My beak was close fettered, the currents of ocean running cold beneath me. There I grew in the sea, my body close to the moving wood. I was alive when I came from the water clad all in black, but part of me white. When the living air lifted me up, the wind from the wave bore me afar.’
