The latter is more appropriate and what I would use in journals, but in conversation I use Canadian as that's how I was raised and most in the field don't mind either way. In the example you give, that one goose who seemed to have missed the boat will likely meet up with the flock again at one of the 'stops' along the migration route.Įdit: Changed 'Canadian Goose' to 'Canada Goose'. In cases where an individual is separated from the flock, it is possible that they can join another flock but this, as I recall, is somewhat rare. Therefore, these flocks tend to stay together and individuals do their best to avoid separation. So while you do not have as defined of a pecking order (heh) in this social grouping, you still observe familiarity and friendliness of individuals to others within their flock. Each flock is a social structure that you can roughly equate to that of a wolf pack with less hierarchical organization.

Simply put, geese almost always flock in consistent groups. Bird species, even within families, differ wildly in behavioral terms, so this is specific to the Canada Goose. But still I’d rather have the hurricane than the bomb.Hi, ornithologist here! Though my particular research is focused on passeriformes (think starlings and sparrows) rather than anseriformes (ducks and geese), my old research/thesis advisor studied the Canada Goose at length so I have some knowledge of this content area. The biggest known H-bomb, you may remember, is less than 100 megatons. (2) The average hurricane generates energy roughly equivalent to 400 20-megaton bombs exploding in one day - the equivalent of all the electrical energy used in the U.S. and Russia maintain vast nuclear arsenals only a fool would say it doesn’t matter at all. The question was never satisfactorily resolved during the cold war, and maybe in these marginally more peaceful times it doesn’t matter as much. defense computer network is dangerously unreliable. Like their counterparts in the nuclear power industry, the officials also claim that the fact that these scares have yet to result in World War III proves the system works. Pentagon officials have admitted that equipment failures cause two or three false alarms every year. For example, on November 9, 1979, some hapless clerical type inadvertently fed a training tape into the main computers at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, giving a false indication of a massive missile attack and scaring the bejeezis out of U.S. Most of these were minor, but a few weren’t.

Still, investigators also found that false alarms of one kind or another were a constant occurrence, 3,703 having been reported in the 18 months prior to June, 1980. There was a great flurry in the media about the close call, but a Senate inquiry later concluded that the nation hadn’t really come all that close to war. Engineers eventually traced the problem to a 46-cent computer chip that had shorted out. The alert was terminated at 2:29, three minutes and 12 seconds after it began.

Command post honchos quickly concluded that there was a malfunction in the computer system that relayed battle data, and the bomber crews were ordered to shut off their engines. For 60 seconds things looked tense, but by then the radar stations were reporting that they could find no sign of the Russian missiles. Meanwhile, headquarters checked with remote radar stations to see if they could confirm the enemy contact.

Klaxons awakened bomber and missile crews, and 76 B-52s were prepared for takeoff. At 2:26 in the morning, alarms went off in the Strategic Air Command’s underground command post in Omaha as display screens showed two Russian sub-based missiles heading toward the U.S. Perhaps the most notorious incident occurred on June 3, 1980. In 1960, for instance, nuclear alerts were reportedly triggered by meteor showers and lunar radar reflections. Whether or not this actually happened, there are several well-documented instances of nuclear near-misses that really did occur. Jumpy technicians supposedly interpreted the blips as Russky bombers, and until cooler heads prevailed several trembling fingers were poised above the buttons that would have reduced the Soviet Union to a puddle of molten glass. The story, which may be apocryphal, is that in the 1950s a flock of Canadian geese showed up one day on radar screens in the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, the string of radar pickets maintained by the U.S. (1) You refer to one of the great legends of the nuclear era.

Flock of geese