I think it’s time to give our geese a round of applause.
They’ve had a pretty hard time finding their place on the farm, but I think now, finally, they’ve got it, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Let’s start the story from the beginning.
Elwyn, Brooks, and White came to the farm as beautiful, soft, lovely noise-and-troublemakers. As much as they are as close to dream-geese as they come– soft and satisfyingly heavy, gorgeously grey and very intelligent– they also made a mess, and politely ignored our repeated suggestion that they live in the yard.
No, thank you– we know you’ve set out a bathing trough for us, built us a goose-house, and bring us a pan of feed every day, but we’d much prefer you let us live in the sheep’s pasture. Eat their food, sleep in their barn, and, without exception, bathe in their water troughs every single time you clean them. Thanks!
It really was the water-tank thing that got to us– poop and feathers in the sheep’s water meant that the whole just-cleaned thing needed to be poured out. Combining that with the normal level of late-winter muddiness, and we had quite a mess.
Then, in February, Elwyn and Brooks started laying eggs in the back corner of the run-in, and, like a good gander, White started defending them. Unfortunately, that meant that he’d go after any animal who came close to the nest– even those who’d never harm it.
Like sheep.
After we saw him biting poor Catalina, we scooped up all three geese and plunked them, their house, and their water down in a copse at the other end of the farm, in a small enclosure built of moveable panels.
They weren’t exactly happy about being there. It rained and snowed, and they churned the whole enclosure to mud as deep as their undersides, and laid sad, forgotten mud-eggs.
We knew we had to move them, and to somewhere 1) where they could be by themselves, 2) big enough that they couldn’t do it damage, and 3) from which they could (or would) not escape?
But where was that? And what can you do with a bunch of mean, territorial, sheep-biting geese?
Geese can be malicious.
And then Zac had a flash of brilliance, and decided that they needed a job. He moved them to the garden, after fencing off the garlic bed, for fear they’d destroy the crop, and put our luckless trio to work.
And work they did! They ate the whole thing down to the ground in just a few weeks, weeds and all!
When we were ready to plant our earliest crops, we fenced off the new garden and put them in there– they’re working on cleaning that up as we speak. They’ve built themselves a new nest, and filled it with ten eggs (not counting the ones we’ve eaten!). No word yet on goslings, but we’ve got our fingers crossed.
Once the plants in the garden reach an unappetizing size, the geese should leave them alone, and will (in theory), aim for the smaller, weaker weeds (hence, “weeder geese”). Between us and the geese, I think we’ve got a fighting chance.
The moral of the story is this: that a farm is the sum of its parts, and every part has a role to play. It can be difficult to find one’s place, and, sometimes, it takes several attempts before one fits in. I’m glad we figured out what to do with our nightmare geese– now, instead of two widely different problems (mean geese, lots of weeds), we have an elegant solution. And there’s nothing more pleasing than that.
.