The geese (STILL yet to be named!!) are really settled now and they have proved to be surprisingly unadventurous. They now live in the top 3-acre field and either sleep in the barn or outside. During the day it is VERY rare to see them go much beyond the field shelters and as such they are obviously finding enough grass to eat in what is really quite a small patch. As with all the poultry they love their corn and we now have a fabulous routine whereby as soon as the goats have finished their tea and gone inside the barn (or back out to browse), we then give the geese their corn (if we fed the geese first then the goats would steal it…). The geese are tame enough now that they virtually take the corn out of the jug as we sprinkle it on the grass. We always put it close to their water drinker as geese (and ducks) always need to ‘wash down’ the corn with a drink or two. One of their favourite places is just by the gate back up into the garden and it is rather nice that they are therefore always the first animals we see (and hear) as we enter the smallholding and the last ones we see before we leave it in the evenings. We don’t (touch wood) have any reason to be worried about security here but if we ever did get anyone wandering onto our property, we know the dogs would sound the alarm first, closely followed by the geese. It’s quite comforting really.
We have just two goslings now, one male and one female. From our seven eggs we lost one at every stage. From our seven eggs: six eggs were fertile; five grew; four hatched; three survived beyond the first 24 hours and then when the goslings were around three weeks old, we lost another. She was not growing anywhere near as fast as the others which suggested some kind of genetic defect specific to her!! Our remaining pair are now huge and the female in particular is starting to look great. We will advertise them for sale soon as we don’t want to keep them much beyond the summer.
And next year we hope to be able to raise a few more…