A woman walks out of a club to find... the goose cloud of Taradale

The goose cloud formation - scientific name Cumulus Goosulus or Cirroduckilaris - over the Taradale Club in Napier. Photo / Jane from Hastings

Walking out of a club and bar into the daylight is prime time for hallucinations in the sky.

But for one Hastings woman, the odd sight of a giant goose cloud in the midday blue over the Taradale Club is not just a blurry memory.

There weren’t six-geese-a-laying - just one seemingly about to flap its wings.

But Jane (who’s a bit shy about the photo she took and her last name being published) said the cloud was probably using the 12 days of Christmas to fly home in the west.

Emerging from a car club luncheon at the club between 2pm and 3pm on December 15, there it was, northeast over the hills, a cloud depicting the avian wonder.

Jane said she was relieved that everyone around her had agreed that a) it was a cloud formation and b) it was in the shape of a giant bird.

Several phone cameras began to click.

“As we turned around in the carpark, someone said: ‘Look at that in the sky.’ And there it was, it looked like a big bird stretching out.”

MetService meteorologist Lewis Ferris said he’d taken a gander at the photo and it was indeed a very “goosey-looking cloud”.

It appeared to be a mixed-breed variety, he said.

“The smooth-looking long cloud looks like altocumulus-lenticularis, or lenticular cloud for short, which people of Hawke’s Bay will be no strangers to,” Ferris said.

“The ‘wings’ look more like a bit of cirrocumulus, but it’s hard to determine their height from a single image so it could also be altocumulus.”

Ferris said the hardworking meteorologists at MetService had taken a quick break from predicting festive weather to come up with a scientific name for the cloud combination.

The top contenders were Cumulus Goosulus and Cirroduckilaris, he said.

Jane, in a dash of humility about her photographic timing, reckons someone could have done better at capturing it if they’d had an expensive camera.

Speaking of which, the Hawke’s Bay Today Harvey Norman Canon NZ summer photo competition is coming - look out for more details about everyone’s favourite amateur snap show in the next week.

Don’t even think about photoshopping up a goose cloud and sending it to us though. You won’t be able to top the real thing from Jane.

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 50 years of journalism experience in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues and personalities.