Geese

Geese are wonderful birds! They are big and strong, make a lot of noise (especially at dinner time!), and graze rather than dig up the pasture. We used to have a lot of geese though, and the pasture really suffered from overgrazing and we needed to have a break for a few years…but not for long because we missed them!

It was hard to buy adult geese, so we invested in an incubator (something we had been considering for some time) and some fertile goose eggs. Funnily enough, on picking up the eggs we were also offered a goose if we took a spare gander…so naturally we did.

Just hatching!

Just hatching!

We were so lucky to be able to actually watch one of them hatch! We used a tub with a light while they were small……..

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but they quickly had to be moved to bigger quarters…… this entailed a cage set up in the rabbit house where they were protected from the cold (and we could plug in a light)….because they STANK!! Every day we put them outside in another cage on some nice fresh grass, and this they loved!

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…..and before long they had outgrown all of that too and went into their own pen.

The geese all live together very happily, and love grazing on the paddock and wandering down to the ‘dam’ for a swim and paddle, where they join the ducks.

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Geese enjoying the dam

Geese enjoying the dam