I seem to have a bad luck streak regarding birds. This is probably one of the reasons I feel totally okay about eating them. The first fowl experience was The Mad Queen and the hits just keep coming.

For example, I’ve been hit in the nuts by a haunted plastic goose.

Whiskey and geese just don’t mix.

When M.I.L.K. and I were small, our mom took us to a duck pond in Palo Alto. We jumped out of the car, each clutching a loaf of stale bread, and ran to feed the duckies. We got to the water line and began frantically shredding and tossing bread to a bunch of enthusiastic ducks. The duck feeding was going swimmingly when a goose almost as tall as me, and easily eye to eye with M.I.L.K. ran towards us. Neat, I thought.

But this goose didn’t want to be fed, it wanted to hunt.

I was in awe of the beautiful, giant grey and white waterfowl lumbering toward me, and I held out a hunk of bread as if to say, “hello fellow traveler on spaceship earth, here is a peace-offering from an innocent child, who has yet to acquire a 12 gauge or let foie gras grace his palate.”

We had a touching moment of animal-human communication…and then THE SON OF A BITCH ATTACKED ME! Have you ever been bit by a goose? It’s like being pinched by an irate elderly lady over and over. It hurts in a comical way.

We ran for our lives. Fleeing Goosezilla, I threw my loaf of bread, still in its amber bag at the beast. The mallards swarmed on it but the goose kept coming for kid flesh, flapping its wings and biting us. Well, mostly biting M.I.L.K. because she was slower than me. You know the old expression: you don’t have to be faster than an angry goose, you just have to be faster than your little sister. We reached safety by hiding behind mom’s legs, as geese apparently fear adult humans. Importantly, this is not so for turkeys (more on that later).

The victorious goose then proudly goose stepped about like the reincarnated Nazi it probably was.

More tales of bad birds coming soon.