Our house in Baltimore, which was built when the Great Fire of 1904 was a recent memory, has walls like a bunker: a heavy layer of concrete stucco slathered on courses of thick ceramic block.

This makes for quiet nights in winter, when the windows are shut tight against the cold. Lying in bed, with the garage light winking on and off, its motion sensor tricked by waving tree limbs, we’ll hear the distant rumble of a city bus; the faint wail of a passenger jet descending to BWI; the occasional gunshot, sometimes frighteningly close.

The only sound that reliably penetrates from the animal kingdom is the majestic honking of geese flying overhead.

“Flying,” and not “migrating.” The geese around here are mostly homebodies, snowbirds who’ve discovered that the place isn’t too bad, even in the off-season. You’ll see flocks of them chowing down on big winter lawns; paddling around municipal ponds; even waddling across commuter roads.

Some subspecies of the Canada goose were once considered endangered; these days, the populations have come roaring back to the point where their conservation status is designated “LC,” for “least concern.”

Groundskeepers consider the geese a great nuisance, but at night, lying sleepless under the spell of their urgent honking, I can’t help but think of their epic migrations, flights that carry them across thousands of miles of borderless landscape, often at altitudes set aside for commercial jetliners.

How do they do it? The precision of their navigation; their innate sense of seasonal timing; the orderliness of their ranks; their incredible physical endurance — each detail of their migration is astonishing in its own way.

One of the tricks of the trade seems to be the clever vee formation, which any bicycle racer could tell you is a strategy for managing wind resistance. How clever a strategy? Just last week, an article in the journal Nature detailed the group aerodynamics of a similar migrating bird, the northern bald ibis. These birds were raised in captivity and imprinted on the pilot of a powered parachute, who led them, when they reached maturity, on a migration from Austria to Tuscany. The birds were fitted with electronics that allowed very precise data to be collected on each flap of their wings, and each bird’s position relative to the rest of the flock.

Some of the results confirmed what you’d expect: the flock organized itself to take advantage of the phenomenon called “drafting.” Just as the riders on a bicycle team take turns out front to reduce wind resistance for their teammates, migrating birds like the ibis and goose fall into line behind the strongest flyer. When the leader tires, a new bird takes his place.

That much was well known. What surprised the ibis researchers was the degree to which the birds synchronize the flapping of their wings, becoming, in effect, a single large and efficient wedge slicing through the air.

You may have heard the expression “wake turbulence” in association with airplanes. Or perhaps you’ve felt it without even knowing it on final approach to a landing. Wake turbulence is a byproduct of the flow of air over the wingtip of a plane. You can see it sometimes in foggy conditions, rotating like horizontal tornadoes behind the wings.

Jumbo jets can leave very strong wake turbulence, especially during takeoff and landing — strong enough to damage a smaller plane, or even cause another large jet to crash.

Bird wings create “wake turbulence” too, but not the destructive kind. In fact, the turbulence one bird creates can be helpful to the bird behind it, if the flapping of the follower’s wings is timed just so.

The researchers discovered that even in an inexperienced flock, the birds soon found the perfect rhythm for their wings and learned how to quickly accommodate a change in the lead bird.

This may seem intuitive, especially if you have experience with a team sport where players adjust to each other’s strengths and weaknesses moment by moment.

But it means that migrating birds have an innate mechanism for sensing the most efficient rate of flapping and the best angle of attack for their wings. Apparently, when every bird finds the “sweet spot” — i.e., the rhythm that works for the whole flock — it just feels right.

Like paddlers on a great ocean-going canoe, the geese coordinate their individual efforts, the better to cover the continental distances of the ancient flyways.