Today was the day for setting eggs as we now have 24 goose eggs and the time had come to start incubating them. As mentioned back on 26th Feb, we had debated giving some to our broody chickens but despite having three current ones, none of them have been broody before and as such their reliability is unknown. It has also become clear over the last week that although both geese now lay in the stable, it is too ‘busy’ in there for them to successfully go broody. They get stressed when we go in to clean each day and the turkeys also hassle them. We thus decided to put all 24 eggs in our large incubator - all set up a couple of days again and despite not being used for 3 years, working beautifully!! Some of the eggs are now well over 2 weeks old but we will keep our fingers crossed and see. Last year due to getting the geese quite late in the laying season (April) we only managed to get seven eggs. Of these, six were fertile, five grew, four hatched, three survived beyond 24 hours and then one gosling didn’t grow that well and died around 3-4 weeks old.
So, two from seven was not a great result and at that rate (28%), we would end up with under 7 birds from this batch. We sincerely hope we will do better than that!!!
Time will tell, and to say we are a tad nervous is an understatement!
We also gave a total of 13 chicken eggs to our three chicken broodies: all white, green, blue or dark brown!!! All part of our quest to produce chickens that lay as many different coloured eggs as possible! As these are our own eggs and easily replacement we won't worry too much if these first -time broodies don't do a good job, althouigh it will be great if they do!!