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WILLOW'S FLOCK

Bonding with Geese

4/6/2021

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It is easy to bond with goslings! All it takes are plenty of cuddles and conversations.
Goslings love it when you pick them up and hold them close and allow them to snuggle up. They will climb up to your shoulder into your hair or hide in your jacket.
They also love conversations as do adults. They enjoy noises and repeated words. Certain geese enjoy certain words more than others. They will come to love a word that you repetitively tell them when you are raising them. My older geese are fans of honk while my younger geese do not care much for it.
It is not necessarily a bad sign when goslings or geese peck and chew on you or your clothes or things. It all depends on their behaviors such as body posture and expressions. Most of my goslings have meant it in a friendly manner. Some are more vicious (still friendly, just getting carried away) than others and do hurt. The more vicious they are though is a good indicator of how friendly they are. They enjoy grabbing your finger, pecking at your hands, clothes, hair, etc. They will also eat your hair.. The adults do the same things. 
Particular favorites of goslings and geese are hair, shoelaces, buttons, and fingers.
When geese eat your finger it hurts. I typically do scold the geese for this but they do not appear to be affected by their scolding.
My geese - I assume all geese - love green stuff. They seem to have preferences about green stuff but those preferences will not stop them from eating the green stuff you offer. They typically seem a little setback by herbs but they will learn to eat them nonetheless. My geese will be on good terms with me if I offer a decent harvest of weeds. They also adore their food. It is fortunate that they do so that I can train them pretty well if they start refusing to eat out of my hand.
Training your geese to eat out of your hand works pretty well to keep them decently friendly even when you have a flock of twenty five geese! I spent plenty of time with them as goslings, of course, while teaching them to eat out of my hand and allowing them time to chew on clothes, hair, and shoelaces. Besides scolding them for eating my fingers I will scold geese and goslings alike if where they chew on me hurts. Of course, they do not seem to remember next time they are back to chewing or when they resume. They will spend a very decent amount of time chewing on you. It seems to be a sort of entertainment for the geese.
Geese get very excited when you pretend to be a goose and bow and honk and makes all kinds of other goose-like noises. Either they are mad or excited to see that you are actually a goose like they thought instead of a strange creature that they do not know the name of. Some of them will get extremely close during your outbreak of goose behaviors.. so close that you could almost break free of your goose behaviors and grab them despite them not liking being grabbed all that much.
Grabbing geese do make me lose progress with them. I hope to mostly de-sensitize them to being touched and then proceed to train them to let me pick them up. All of that will take a while to do. I had trained them at one point to stand on me when I was kneeling. Certain individuals came to the point of not immediately leaving in terror and would actually stay and eat out of my hand or stretch out their necks and eat out of the food bucket. Some of them having learned this would climb onto me when I was kneeling without being surprised when they realized they had just climbed onto me and off. Some would stay on me once climbing up which had been what I was training them for. I have not continued this practice so they do not do this now.
The summary is... lots of cuddles as goslings, hand-feeding, do not pick them up, and let them eat you!
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Batches of 2021

3/23/2021

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Batch #024: Set January 18, 2021. 10 eggs were set. At lockdown 7 eggs were developed. Lockdown was February 12, 2021. 6 goslings hatched on February 16, 2021. Goslings were named Snowflake, Wintergreen, Columbine, Yarrow, Daffodil, and Grass of Parnassus.
Batch #025: Set January 29, 2021. 17 eggs were set. At lockdown 13 eggs were developed. Lockdown was February 23, 2021. All 13 goslings hatched from February 28 through March 1, 2021.
Batch #026: Set February 6, 2021. 19 eggs were set. At lockdown 13 eggs were developed. Lockdown was March 3, 2021. 12 goslings hatched from March 9 through March 11, 2021.
Batch #027: Set February 12, 2021. 9 eggs were set. At lockdown 6 eggs were developed. Lockdown was March 10, 2021. 6 goslings hatched from March 13 through 14, 2021 and one hatched March 16, 2021.
Batch #028: Set February 26, 2021. 3 eggs were set. At lockdown 2 eggs are developed.  Lockdown was March 23, 2021. Waiting to see if both hatch and when they do. Goslings should hatch around March 27, 2021.
Batch #029: Set March 12, 2021. 28 eggs were set. Lockdown is April 6, 2021. Goslings should hatch around April 11, 2021.
​Batch #030: Will be setting this batch which will be the largest batch I have ever had on March 26, 2021. Lockdown will be April 20, 2021. Goslings should hatch around April 24, 2021. 
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Goose Entries: Rocky and Dragon

9/15/2020

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Rocky (left) and Dragon (right)
Rocky, #102, Batch #019. Hatched September 13, 2020.
Has a little knob. Bulky.
Mother is Black Tupelo. First recorded gosling of Tupelo. Father could be Eastern Redbud, Baldcypress, or Black Cherry.
Female.

​Dragon, #103, Batch #019. Hatched September 14, 2020.
Darker markings than Rocky.
Mother is Gingko. First recorded son of Gingko. Father could Eastern Redbud, Baldcypress, or Black Cherry.  
​Male.
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Rocky
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Dragon
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Goose Entries: Sprinkles

9/11/2020

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Sprinkles, #101, Batch #018. Hatched September 4, 2020.
No unusual markings.
Mother is Gingko. Father unknown but some possibilities are Eastern Redbud or Baldcypress.​
Older siblings, Thunder and Tiger.
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Goose Entries: Elizabeth and Mary Beth

6/25/2020

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Mary Beth (left) and Elizabeth (right)
Elizabeth, #99, Batch #015. Hatched June 24, 2020.
Darker markings compared to Mary Beth.
Mother is Siberian Elm and father is therefore likely to be Black Cherry.
Looks a lot like previous goslings who were her siblings. Hatched around 8:00 PM. 

Mary Beth, #100, Batch #015. Hatched June 24, 2020.
Lighter markings compared to Elizabeth.
Mother is Siberian Elm and father is therefore likely to be Black Cherry. 
The sweeter of the two and pretty unique face.
Uncertain of when she hatched but was probably during the night of June 24. 
Found hatched on June 25, 2020.
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Goose Entries: Willow CrenShaw and Currant

6/19/2020

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Currant
Willow Crenshaw and Currant are from Batch #011. Willow Crenshaw hatched the night of April 27, 2020. I found her the morning of April 28. Later on that day Currant would hatch. There were two other goslings from this batch as well who were related to Currant. These two I did not keep. I did not intend to keep any geese from this batch but this was a problem batch. Willow was the second to hatch and she hatched with only one eye. Currant did not seem to be having any trouble ​

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Goose Entries: Broom

6/16/2020

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Broom the gosling
I plan to post an entry for each batch. Broom was the only one to hatch from six set eggs. She hatched on June 13, 2020. Her ID is #98. Her batch is #014.  I sexed this goose and know it is a female. Broom has an incomplete crescent under each eye. The picture does not show how it looks now. She is super sweet because of her being the only one to hatch. I spent plenty of time with her involving cuddles and pets. She is pecky kind of gosling which is 

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White Geese

6/2/2020

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I have been raising Gray African/Chinese geese for two years now and I have heard about the white geese. People often have them alongside a gray goose in pairs. I had been speculating on changing to Roman geese until I found out that they are very likely to have defects but white Chinese geese would make up for that. I believe they are supposed to have blue eyes like all the other white geese but I am not sure. White Chinese geese are supposed to have a colorless gene instead of a white gene. Making everything regarding breeding totally different.

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Willow's Flock Naming SyStem

5/23/2020

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Goslings
When I got my first goose I had not decided on what I would name them after. It did not take too long before I came up with something. I wanted something I knew a good amount about and that is... trees! My first goose was named after my favorite tree - Weeping Willow. Now that I have had many geese and had to come up with many names they are helping me continue to learn about fascinating trees! I also allow myself to do shrubs so that I will have plenty of names to use for a long time.

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The Children of Sassafras

5/18/2020

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Butternut (left) and Sassafras (right)
Sassafras was one of my first geese. She was one of those goslings I could identify when she was young. It was also guessed that she was a female. She grew up to have a nice trait - a dark stripe. She was the second to last to lay last year and the following year she began laying in December. Unfortunately, a fox would get her on January 11. But because she had been laying previous to this I could hatch a few goslings from her. 

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<<Previous

    my name is Emily

    I have twenty-eight geese. I hatch a bunch of goslings because I want a lot of people to have geese. I do not see them everywhere but I want to! The goslings are the sweetest baby birds I know! The adult males are proud and can be cranky but have their sweet moments while the females are shy and sweet all at the same time.

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  • Home
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