Sexing Goslings and Other Fun Times at Our House

Chock it up to yet another thing on the list of things I never knew I would learn in this life. Last night, the boys caught the young goslings and I worked on determining boys and girls. Yup, sexing geese. I never thought I would be able to add that to the list! Seriously, who puts that on their career goals, anyway?

The geese around here are interesting. Not overly friendly, but not mean. They keep the hawks and owls from attacking. From times of losing chickens even through the roofs of pens, we have not had one loss like this since the geese came to live with us 2 years ago. They are pranksters, trading pranks with the puppy and the goats, and busybodies, always with their nose in someone's business. But they do their job.

Each year in the Spring, Mother Goose nestles in to hatch babies. I set her up with her own food and water, over behind the swingset near the old greenhouse. Twice a day Uncle Wiggly gets her up and they fly around to the goose area to eat and drink before he walks her back. He looks out for her, and is an attentive father as babies hatch as well as with rearing them.

We keep several small water containers with their food so they have easy access to water without letting the little ones get in over their head in the good area.

The baby geese have the sweetest little voices! I hope you have the volume turned up! While they are beginning to get the orange in their bills and legs, the voices are all baby!

They are rather used to free run of the property! They meet me at the feed shed in the morning and ask to be fed before the other animals on my list.

Shadow Paws, who normally pranks the adult geese in exchange for them pranking her, maintains a safe distance to keep the geese parents happy while they are raising the little ones. 

However, we DO NOT need EIGHT GEESE. Goodness! We have a few folks that requested to be called first for little ones once they were sexed, and I will do that today, and give them until the end of the week before I open it up to others. But in calling, the first question is often, are they males or females?

So after dinner last night, the boys caught the little ones, one at a time, and I working on determining sex.  This little female really relaxed int he process.

He stood her back up, and she registered her complaint!

This one had even more to say!

I love the attitude form this one. By the way, curious about the plant pot on what used to be my clothesline? There is a fake owl there that the puppy thought looked VERY destructive. We had hoped the pot would save the clothesline from the puppy, but it blew off, and now Wyatt put it back on.

This one took its attitude straight to Charlie!

I am not going to claim to be anything approaching an expert at sexing chicks or goslings! But so that you know, here is what we did...

Vent sexing. And I have to admit, I had to ask for help with the camera since my hands were occupied, and clearly that didn't work out very well. I will add more photos later for better reference. This one is a female. If you could see more closely, the vent relaxes and begins to separate, leading to a little open there, showing you either (n this case) the folds just inside the vent and nothing else,

or in this case, a little corkscrew of a penis protruding out.  One of them didn't relax well for me, and while I think it is a girl, I will double check all of the girls to make sure one boy didn't sneak through. Our best educated guess right now, though, is One young gander, four young geese. At most, I believe I could be wrong on one of the girls.

I bet you always wondered about that, right?  Well, I will call folks this afternoon and give them the option of picking up geese, and I will admit we will likely be keeping a little female.  (We will work on naming her once all the dust is settled!) 

We will catch you up o more later. So, what things have you learned to do that you never though you would need to?

Redneck Engineering Saturday

They say that necessity is the mother if invention. That is often how our redneck engineering has come to pass. We live in Southern Arizona, so there is a lot of sandy soil, and very little grass. Therefore we bring in hay and feed, and grow fresh in container gardens in the pens. The problem is that when we clean pens, a lot of dirt gets shoveled out with the poop, and the ground level in the pens has slowly but steadily lead to lower ground in the goat pens. The chicken areas have easily had their holes filled over time, but the goats aren't so easy. We have tried several "scoop" solutions over the years, with this being our last incarnation...

Yep- hardware cloth over a horse pooper scooper, because the pellets would go right through otherwise. The problem with the scoop was you had to largely shake the scoop to get the dirt out, and that was another cloud of dust and allergy issues to deal with. So with Bailey getting ready to leave for summer, and kidding season almost upon us, Bailey and I sat at morning milking with a topic on our minds looking for something better. What else to do but raid the scrap pile?

There was a piece of hardware cloth (that stuff is awesome) used as a temporary fix on a fence panel that Wyatt and I are due to fix before that temp pen gets used again. So we didn't need it anymore, and procured it. Then to the woodpile. These boards seemed like a nice start. There were too more that size, but they would not work due to the size of the hardware cloth.  So Bailey headed off to the power tools.

She was a little concerned at one point about the edges and wood, but this isn't staying in the pen, only being used for muck. We are good with this. Here is how the "tool" came out.

Here it is in use. My milking doe, Mama Lulu wanted to help. Or be quality control. Or just be cuddled along the way, you never quite know with her!

This area of the pen- the doe barn has long been the worst. Which is awful, since their food is here! As we began shoveling large amounts of loose dirt out to get the poop, we confirmed just how low the dirt would go, and decided to add a concrete brick under each end of the hay feeder to bring a little stability and give us an idea where the level was when we finished.

Mama Lulu loves to ham it up for the camera, and started playing peekaboo from behind the hay feeder.

When we run the dirt throuh, the dirt falls down and leaves us with poop on top of the mesh. Then we dump the mesh into the muck wagon. If I had it to do over, one end would have a larger spot than this for the muck to run down to make it less messy dumping. Live and learn. But we did much better at leaving the dirt in the pen.

Here we are, part way done, with Versie checking things out.

They also liked to walk wherever we just cleaned and leave us more work to do!

Silver and Glory wanted to get in on the action. They wanted to help spread out the piles of dirt. Too bad they didn't want to carry them back to the doe barn!

Lulu saw the camera, had to scratch her chin as the sun was goig down behind her.

Goofy girl!

Here we were almost done. We will never get every single piece of poop and leave the dirt behind, but this worked much better! Score one for the Patriot's Dream girls and a little Saturday ingenuity!

The does ended up wanting two yellow "ribbons" to decorate for memorial day. I offered them their red white and blue ones from the shed, but they liked these from their hay bales and the yellow that even though we pay our respects this weekend to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, we don't forget those presently with boots on the ground while we are here at home.

Wyatt has decided he is going to show pygmy goats as well next year. He always said that he would as soon as they let him show bucks, which they won't, but he rather likes little McAllie. So Bailey taught him to trim hooves last night.

Well, that made for a productive day for us, even if we did want to get more done. What redneck engineering have you tried? Care to share with us?