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?
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