Friday 5th May 2017
The geese move house!
A geese/duckling update is needed!!! Sad to say that we lost another duckling on the 3rd and as Banana had stayed inside the stable for much of the day, the culprits looked more and more as though they were the geese. We kept geese a few years ago and had no problems but the ‘University of Facebook’ tells us that some geese can be quite brutal with ‘strange’ ducklings: picking them up, shaking them and then discarding them. We have not found any ‘bodies’ and as such there is still a chance that we could be looking at rats or weasels (who would have stolen the ducklings for food and left not a trace) but we have seen zero signs of any predators, the poultry generally have not raised any alarms AND most significantly, we are aware that since the geese’ arrival, the ducks have become somewhat withdrawn. They have kept away from the geese, often not joining the rest of the flock at corn time and the fact that Banana stayed inside on 3rd, suggests she may have been aware of a ‘continuing’ threat. When we lost ducklings to corvids a few years back, the ducks seemed unaware of the dangers then, possibly because the predators (the corvids) were not always there??!!
Much of our thinking is speculative and at the end of the day, two ducklings had vanished and we needed to preserve the life of the third! For the last two days therefore Banana and duckling have been confined to their run in the stable whilst we pondered what to do. Last night we decided that of the two choices, selling the geese or moving them, we wanted to try the latter. Apart from anything else, if we sold them and then the final duckling vanished, we would feel really guilty and somewhat annoyed. Today therefore, we set up the 4-acre field shelter for them, we hurdled off the front so the cows cannot get in but left a narrow dog-leg walkway so that the geese can. We then filled it with fresh straw and created a wall of bales to provide a bit of privacy for the females to lay eggs. When we let them out in the morning they will then have the whole 4-acre field to roam, along with the cows of course! The field shelter incidentally, is NOT fox proof but having seen no sign of foxes and because these are ‘geese’, we are tentatively optimistic that we won’t have a problem. (We hope NOT to be eating these words in the future…)
The other issue is that we now no longer have our ‘natural lawn movers’ to keep down the grass in the poultry paddock and we cannot use any of the 4-legged stock as they would also eat all the willow we have planted!! We may have to mow mechanically which will be a shame!!
On a brighter note we now have seven goose eggs, although the last was laid over a week ago, since when no more have been laid. The geese have steadfastly refused to use the pig arc (now being used very successfully by the remaining three turkeys [another story] and in rearranging the nest boxes last week - in order to provide more privacy - all we succeeded in doing was confusing them so they stopped laying altogether!! And now we have moved the geese, it will probably be a while longer before they start to lay again and so, in order not to waste the eggs, we decided to give them to a couple of the chickens who had just gone broody. As such we now have an Indian Game sat on four and Queenie Baby Blue (QBB) on three.
And after all this effort and change around, let’s now hope that tomorrow, when we let Banana and duckling back outside, that come the end of the day, BOTH of them find their way back in!!!
The other issue is that we now no longer have our ‘natural lawn movers’ to keep down the grass in the poultry paddock and we cannot use any of the 4-legged stock as they would also eat all the willow we have planted!! We may have to mow mechanically which will be a shame!!
On a brighter note we now have seven goose eggs, although the last was laid over a week ago, since when no more have been laid. The geese have steadfastly refused to use the pig arc (now being used very successfully by the remaining three turkeys [another story] and in rearranging the nest boxes last week - in order to provide more privacy - all we succeeded in doing was confusing them so they stopped laying altogether!! And now we have moved the geese, it will probably be a while longer before they start to lay again and so, in order not to waste the eggs, we decided to give them to a couple of the chickens who had just gone broody. As such we now have an Indian Game sat on four and Queenie Baby Blue (QBB) on three.
And after all this effort and change around, let’s now hope that tomorrow, when we let Banana and duckling back outside, that come the end of the day, BOTH of them find their way back in!!!