Sixteen to Sit On

In our 'book', geese are meant to come into egg laying in spring when they start to receive the attentions of the gander. They will then accumulate 12-14 eggs before conveniently going broody and sitting on them. These "facts" are based, of course on what we've read plus picked up from Anne and Simon plus one chaotic breeding season when our gander was probably the girls' brother and the two geese nested so close together that each could rob all the other's eggs while she hopped off the nest to bathe and the other would then rob them back in her turn. In short we never knew WHERE we were and resolved to do it better this year. Anne will tell you, though, that these 'facts' are no such thing and birds will do what birds will do, unpredictably and surprisingly to keep you, the poor human, on your toes.

The purr-fect excuse to not do the ironing today?

One of our geese ( you may recall they were named Goosey and Goocie for a laugh but between Liz and I we never knew which one we were talking about, so they now have new add-on names which refer to distinguishing features, Goocie is 'Smudge' and Goosey is 'Black Feather'), Smudge, stayed in lay all winter, all through Christmas and is still there now, an egg every other day. She became (Gander) George's first love and he started 'loving' her a good month ago. We decided to let her start accumulating a clutch. Black Feather came back into lay on the 8th Feb but she was sleeping in separate quarters. We knew she wasn't getting mated, so we have been collecting her eggs for the kitchen. Since then, George has now accepted both the geese, so we are all happy families and Black Feather is now laying in the same nest as Smudge, so I have just had to know which day it is and let Smudge carry on accumulating (odd day dated; e.g. 5th, 7th, 9th etc) while robbing Black Feather's even-date (4th, 6th, 8th) eggs. So far so good. Smudge, though has now got up to 16 eggs and is showing no sign of going broody. The weather might be the reason.

Making up bee hive frames. This one for a honey 'super'

After a nice dry, spring like week which had us out gardening and even enjoying a rain-less St. Patrick's Day parade, we are back to wind, rain and wintry showers. This morning I got a nasty surprise while out chain sawing up some logs when I felt a rat-a-tat on my hard-hat and the mesh visor started to get less 'see through'. Snowy wet hail was hammering down on my hat, sticking in the visor mesh and going down the back of my neck. A joke's a joke, but that wasn't.

Finished hive frame. This one for the deeper 'brood' box.

While we are on the 'egg laying' subject, we are now convinced that Guinea Fowl hen, 'Min' is laying eggs in the hedge or scrub at the far side of the field opposite our property. For 4 consecutive days she has nipped off secretly for 2-3 hours, returning at about 3:30 pm. She announces her return with her 'Buck wheat buck wheat' call and Henry is ridiculously delighted to see her, like some sloppy love story re-union. Yesterday she called from the gate and Henry flew the full length of the driveway at 5-6 feet above the ground to be back with her. It's quite sweet. We had seen him hovering around the bit of hedge we think she is using, and once she was back we went for a sneaky check of the brambles etc but could see no sign of the eggs or nest. We are a bit lost on what to do about this so we are clinging to the fact that she should be safe enough in that thicket from Mr Fox (who is still keeping, much to our delight but also surprise and confusion, a very low profile; we (touch wood) never seem to see foxes or mink). We hope (barely able to believe that this could happen) that she goes broody out there, successfully sits for the 28 days and then leads the keets home in a picturesque little 'crocodile'. We are not happy about this but short of trying to contain these wanderers in some kind of aviary, that seems to be our only hope.

Meanwhile a prompt email shout from the Two Marys sorted me out a bit of confusion over assembling bee hive frames. I have two sizes to build, the tall, 'thin' sort for the (11 in the) brood box, and 10 less tall, 'thicker' ones for the honey comb in the 'super' (as in 'upper') boxes. I had a random collection of parts not assigned to either type as well as being a pair of side bars short, so I was a bit stumped. Mary McN has now sorted me out and I am 'away on a hack'. Indoor craft for rainy days. Mustn't put the sheets of foundation in yet though. Being wax, if it gets warm it can sag in the frames making them all uneven for the bees to build from. If it gets cold it can be brittle and can shatter in the frames, so we build the frames up to part-complete and store the sheets of foundation flat at room temperature.

Country Lore (John Deere Bob says...)

The Whooper Swans on Lough Feigh are very noisy at the moment, especially on these cold, crisp, windless, moonlit nights. We can hear them clearly honking and chuntering to one another when we go outside in the evenings to check on things and 'patrol' the dogs (those are mainly about comfort stops for the pooches than checking the boundaries, but if it deters our bushy tailed red-furred chum then so much the better). Local Country Lore has it (this translates more accurately as "John Deere Bob tells us that...") that the geese being noisy is a bad sign, a sure indicator of cold weather and frost to come. I suspect that rather, we are hearing the geese more because the air is already cold, crisp and still, and the sound travels better.

2 plus 1 makes three?

Our goose issue continues, with George having paired off firmly with one of the females (Goocie) to the exclusion of the other (Goosey) whom he now drives away, all be it fairly gently and with no killer instinct. This is not too much of a problem during the day, while they are out in the orchard, but he was having a bit of a go too, inside the goose house at night, where she had less chance of escape. As a result she was reluctant to be shepherded 'home' and showed every sign of not wanting to go in. She slept at least one night in the 'foyer' bit just inside the door while George and his chosen one claimed the 'bedroom' part.

We decided we needed to separate them so that she would not get hurt while we sorted out what to do. This proved dead easy; I re-opened the door and she exploded out, as if she couldn't get out of George's way quickly enough, and between us, Liz and I gently shepherded her round the building to the yard-side door and back into the goose house but outside the wire mesh. She now sleeps there among the feed bins and hay bales, safe and sound. I have put a bucket of water in there for her. She trots back to the orchard each morning to rejoin her sister and His Lordship.

William the Conqueror, still our alpha male.

Meanwhile I have posed a question on my poultry discussion website to ask any goose-keepers what they advise. Is this 'One-Woman Man' thing likely to stick, or will George relent as we come into spring time and Goosey joins Goocie in the egg-laying game? Naturally, there were as many suggestions and opinions as there were replies, but they made for some interesting reading. At one end we had 'do nothing, keep them together like you have' and he will accept her as the hormones start to flow. At the other I had an interesting suggestion - to separate George from the chosen one and make him stay with the 'reject' goose till he learned to love her. In between was even a suggestion to keep the gander with each goose on alternate days. Anyway, we decided to play the waiting game, separating the lonely girl at night and reuniting everyone in the morning, hoping that as spring progresses and George comes into sexual maturity (he's only a youngster and has never actually met any other geese till he arrived here, so he'll only now be learning some inter-goose social skills) all will be well.

Our chickens, on the other hand, have all now settled down into a lovely, stable rhythm and pace of life. We have 9 hens from the various sources (the original 'Lovely Girls', the '8-Ball' and the Hubbards) and these are marshaled around , protected and 'seen to' by our two remaining roosters, William the Conqueror and 'Mr Buff', our big Buff Orpington from the 8-Ball group, hatched at Easter. These two boys get on really well with William having a slight edge on the 'alpha male' scale. They all sleep together, with the Guinea fowl on the perches in the main chicken house except that is, for the Marans Girls (Bubble and Squawk) who persist in going to bed in the smaller 'temporary' house, but that mainly because we have not pressed the point and forced them to move in with the rest. I probably should.

In other news, Liz dabbled her toes back into education and training, going on a 'Train the Trainers' course just before Christmas, mainly as a way of consolidating her existing, but UK-based, skills into a form recognised here in the Republic where they even look a bit sideways at her Open University degree. Well, this being Liz, she can do this training stuff with her eyes closed, so the certificate we received this morning carries the very satisfying grade "Distinction". Go Lizzie!

And last but not least some more of our tongue in cheek long-distance therapy by voodoo-chain-saw. One of Liz's contacts had been suffering from the unpleasant ailment, cystitis, and felt she'd quite like the word included on our 'death row' of words painted on logs so that they could be symbolically rent asunder. All done now and the pictures are posted on the image sharing website. That nice piece of (re)coppiced ash you can see me cutting through is neatly stacked in the log store. The contact is now cured but I suspect that the genuine antibiotics she was prescribed may have had more effect on that than our messing 500 miles away, but we hope we brought a smile to her face.

Small Obsessions

Back before we actually bought these geese we had read that they have nice, amusing personalities with their own idiosyncratic and funny ways. Simon had told us that they get funny little obsessions for no apparent reason which they then cling to like a terrier with a stick, returning time and again to that specific place and thing. If it is a particular fruit tree and maybe a loose flap of bark, they (or maybe just one of them  who has got the idea into his/her head) will worry and worry at it making the tear bigger and bigger till, potentially, they have ring barked and killed the tree. We have tree guards round our orchard trees for that reason. Many trees now have thoroughly chewed lower branch tips.

Goose 'worry-hole'?

We have also had them nibbling and nibbling at a particular bit of ground which looks, to me, like any other. Maybe there we a worm there once which they fancied. The work away at it from all angles till they create a little conical hole in the mud, roughly goose-head size and as deep as they can reach. Obviously when it rain the hole fills up with water and they seem to leave it alone but when it's dry they are back. In the case pictured it is right where I throw down their breakfast grain so, inevitably, some falls down the hole and then there's great excitement as they gather round, heads lowered over the hole, honking loudly.

We love their personalities, too. They are a tight knit group. The 'goslings' have now grown up to the point where they are difficult to tell from the adults. We know, of course, that Goosey and Goocie have black markings in particular places and Gander is the big, wry-tailed, upright boy, usually at the back, but the only real way to tell them now is that the grown ups have that saggy belly between their legs which older geese get, while the 'babies' have tight, smooth under-carriage.

Blue (left) and Rolo at breakfast

These guys, regular readers will know, are our first attempt at breeding geese and all has not gone well because the 'parent birds' we bought as a breeding trio turned out to be, we are sure, fully or recessive 'wry-tailed' as well as being, almost certainly, a sibling group, i.e. brother and two sisters. Unfortunately, therefore, we have been wickedly in-breeding and our first batch have, in many cases, had hatching or subsequent developmental problems and have either died or been culled out, leaving us with only these 2 'babies' from 17 eggs. Not a good score! We have been a bit dispirited by this and frustrated by our "inability to keep them alive" and have doubts about whether we want to be 'in' geese at all. We have a possible option on replacing the gander with one named George, hand reared by our friends down the road (if he turns out to be a boy) but if not we may just keep them for the eggs. Apart from anything else, I am not happy having to slaughter them. I'm not 'happy' doing rabbits or chooks, to be truthful but I can manage it well enough when it needs doing. I think maybe I love geese in a more complex way and cannot, in my head, see them as just food. My problem, I guess, not anything I should be unloading on the reader.

Bubble with her 'bum' feathers in pin. 

Ah well. Enough of this. Today Liz is back from the UK having done her stint of house-minding for Diamond and John. I must walk the dogs now and then grab some lunch before nipping out to Knock Airport to meet her from the plane. It will be good to have her back in the fold.

One thing led to another...

Our 4 male bunnies, leant to Charlotte to try to sell them at the Swinford Show have come back to us unsold for the very good and simple reason that there was no Show, well not on that day, anyway. The lady with the stand on which Charlotte was to help out got her dates mixed up, asked Charlotte to help on the Sunday but then went on the Saturday without Charlotte and there was no 2nd day (Sunday). "That's her every time" was the exasperated cry! Charlotte was then looking to hang onto the boys anyway but the bunnies had other ideas and all spent the day trying to dig their way out of their run (interestingly something they do not do 'at home').

We took the opportunity of Charlotte being here with her rabbit-wrangling skills to finally sort out our 'children' into sex groups. We now have a run with all 6 bucks in it (1 from Padfoot, 3 from Ginny and 2 big ones from Goldie) and a run with 9 does (4 Pads, 4 Gin and 1 big albino from Goldie). We took Goldie herself out and put her with the other 2 Mums thinking she'd get on OK in there being too big to be any risk from the Silverwood pair and too docile to trouble them. This bit of the plan did not work and Ginny and Padfoot turned into aggressive bitches, wanting no part of this big docile brown invader, harrying and trying to kick her. By this morning she was hiding squeezed in behind the hutch with some tufts of fur around her, depressed and lethargic, the picture of misery and despondency.

I have rescued her now to the third run which was temporarily the night-roost for Broody Betty and her 8 Hubbard chicks, rendering them homeless. She (Goldie) is fully recovered and enjoying the peace, eating grass and mini-turnips and occasional treats of red clover flowers or stretched out in the sunshine. The 'bitches' are also back to normal and all the groups of bunnies are in happy family picnic mode on new grass on the front lawn. The turnips, incidentally we are a very successful size crop I grew of 'miniature' turnips (white flesh,  white skin, purple tops etc) which, for some reason, are unpleasantly bitter to the taste, so we humans are ignoring them but the rabbits love them.

Betty and the Hubbards will presumably gather in their usual place at around 8 pm waiting to be put to bed in 'their' run. We are going to try to persuade them that the real chicken coop is a perfectly good substitute. I am not sure Betty will wear this!

The Roscommoner's Vegetable Growing Bible, Klaus Laitenburger's "Vegetable For the Irish Garden" advises against trying to ripen your onions the UK way - lift them out of soil to break the roots, and lay them on the ground in the sunshine. They will just stay wet, he says, in the Irish weather and rot. Do it indoors, he advises, or in a greenhouse. That would definitely have been true last year when we all drowned, but this year we seem to be getting enough dry sunny breaks for it to be worth a try, so I have now lifted my spring-set crop and it is spread out across the front terrace table (which has a mesh top) doing a good job of drying out.

Time now for a quick warning to those readers who do not want to know about the messy side of meat production. Pass by these next paragraphs. If you are still with me, then another story of our inexperience and beginnerishness. In my head I had the figure that the goslings should be ready to start 'finishing' at 3 months old so I was psyching myself up for the unpleasant but necessary task. We had also noticed that the parent geese had started to reject the now fully feathered and grown-up looking young ones, bullying them off food and kicking one or two out of the family group.

We were told that they are coming to that stage where in the wild, the parents would evict them and they'd be off to find their own territory and groups of other youngsters. Charlotte even advised that we might need to clip some wings again else the young would be off across the Roscommon bog-lands and heading for Lough Feigh or Lough Glynn. I decided that it was time to start culling them out and to start with the one we could see being bullied by Goosey and Goocie. Not to go into any detail of the day, we did the deed and in so doing learned quite a bit including that 3 months is WAY TOO YOUNG. The one we culled had a live weight of only 2.974 kg (6 lbs or so - all our recipes talk about 5 kg (10 lb) oven-ready birds!), had a very proud sternum (breast bone), very thin breast muscles and was hell to pluck. The outer feathers came away easy enough but the downy layer feathers were mainly still 'in pin' (like little artists brushes in their tubes) and, in many cases only starting to erupt through the skin. The gutted out, 'oven ready' weight was only 1.628 kg.

We now know, of course, that these are all features of birds killed way too early; if we had given him the 5-6 months we know now is advised then his muscles would have filled out and the secondary feathering we were struggling with, would have grown through properly and could have been gripped properly between thumb and finger. We are advised that the norm would have been for a spring hatching but, Mentor Anne adds, goose fairs would normally be in November, with people buying the birds for finishing off by Christmas. We will be leaving the remaining birds for at least another 2 months and giving them plenty of corn to bulk them up.

With our culled bird out of the flock, the gang all seem to have settled down again, happy families and no bullying. Perhaps our bird was a gander or was provoking the bullying and eviction for some other reason. Either way they are all back together and even Fotherington Thomas is in the 'in crowd'. If it stays that way then all well and good. If there are any more outbreaks of friction we may need to think about penning them separately.

Meanwhile please feel free to have one more smile at our expense. The plucking inevitably leaves some fluffy down still on the goose and you are advised to singe this off with a blow torch (or, more bizarrely, strip it off using the hot strips ladies use to wax their legs with!). I do not have a sensible, hand held blow torch but, bought for our house-build, I do have a big flame-thrower torch used to melt torch-down tar felt. Some people use them to burn weeds out of gravel drives. Picture Liz trying to hold the plucked goose as far as possible away from her body while I selected the gentlest 'flame thrower' setting. Trust me. That bird has no more down!

56

Today I am 56, my 2nd birthday in Ireland and my first in the "new" house. We made a bit of a weekend of it with special meals both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday we invited Mentor(s) Anne and Simon over and Liz cooked up a rather superb supper. Being all chicken keepers this has to be fitted in around 'bed time' for the birds, and with the evenings being now bright till around 7 pm, that means rounding up your birds by about 7.30 pm and socialising after that. The new hearth tiles are now fixed in place with their glue dried, so we were able to light a gentle fire in the main fireplace - it looked very good with the shiny hearth tiles reflecting the light from the flames. Our starter was a pomegranate and goats cheese salad. Main course was an 'Elizabethan Rabbit' recipe from the "Two Fat Ladies" cookbooks served with our own home made naan bread (Madhur Jaffrey recipe). The rabbit was actually one of the progeny of Anne's late buck Peter and our own doe Padfoot (late as in 'since sadly taken by a fox') which was rather nice. Pud was a chocolate mousse. We seemed to crack through a bit of Rioja and French red between us and the chat ebbed and flowed, taking in a fair amount of the recently deceased Maggie Thatcher and the Savita Halappanavar Galway Hospital case, till way gone midnight. Effortless and very enjoyable entertaining in lovely company. Thank you very much for coming, Anne and Simon.

Today we are just 'en famille' with no visitors and Liz is back in action creating a delicious potato-cake breakfast in which I get to eat the 2nd of our latest 2 goose eggs, with lunch as home made soup, coffee breaks featuring lemon drizzle cake and Dorset apple cake and a steak supper. Spoiled I am. I get a rake of birthday greetings through social network site 'Facebook', some cards, a superb (if not that tuneful) rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' over the phone first thing from the assembled Silverwood Choir (cough), a more tuneful rendition later from Diamond and a lovely phone call from Pud Lady. I am taking a day off the pond-digging mainly because it has finally rained so my gardening is restricted to sowing seeds in pots, trays and tubs in the poly tunnel. The rain seems to have changed the appearance of the grass overnight and local farmers breathe sighs of relief that they might get some grazing for their cattle after all. Careful what you wish for, guys! I have clipped all three dogs, instead and very neat and summer-cool they look.

Meanwhile, in an exciting development in the poultry department, we have a goose (or geese) in lay. The photograph might look like a pile of hay but, trust me, it is in fact a hay box containing the start of a clutch of eggs. Let me explain. We were getting a bit concerned that the geese did not seem to be laying any eggs, although to be fair it was frosty most mornings and that awful NE wind had been whipping through for almost 3 weeks. We had even seen the gander 'treading' at least one of his ladies. Seeking advice from the  poultry discussion forum on the internet I was advised that if the geese were getting 'seen to' by the gander then they were almost certainly either laying or would soon start. Search through the hay in the hay-box and delve into the wood shavings, they said. Geese are pretty good at hiding eggs.

Goose eggs (Simon told us) stay viable for quite a long time while the goose accumulates her clutch at a rate of an egg a day or every 2nd or third day, trying to amass 12-14 eggs before she will go broody and sit on the clutch. So the next morning I headed for the goose house to let them out and to rummage and delve, but was presented with an egg in full view in a lovely cup-shaped, goose sized depression in the hay in the box. There proved to be a 2nd egg under the hay, so we collected both for use in the kitchen but then resolved to see if we could manage a clutch. All this had happened over night, quietly and with no drama from the geese.

The next day (now yesterday) that all changed and we seemed to move into a new format and level of excitement. We noticed during the morning that the geese were all hanging around the goose house door and waddling in and out of the house with much honking and noise every time the three got separated (by one being inside or outside and not visible to the others). It seemed this was the first time they had ever done anything other than as a threesome - they are normally glued together as a group, find one and you found them all. This separation was obviously stressful stuff! Eventually they sorted themselves out and Goocie sat on the box of hay while Gander and Goosey took them off a small distance to graze while Gander continued to honk and shout every few minutes, as if to reassure the sitting goose that he was still around. I went off to dig pond and after a half hour or so, Goocie emerged from the house and waddled over to find the other two.

Liz and I waited till they were safely out of sight and sneaked a peek into the house. At first we thought there was no egg but, no, there was indeed and egg but so carefully hidden under hay pulled across the top that it was invisible from above. I noticed in the evening when I went to round up the geese that Goocie went into the house and straight over to the hay box where she poked about checking that the egg was still there. We hope this means that she is now in 'accumulating a clutch' mode, so we have left that egg intact and will wait and see. There were no more eggs over night or today. Anne and Simon tells us that we may need to try to separate the 2 females if they both start nesting as they can hassle each other and start interfering with each others' nests, stealing or breaking eggs etc. This might have practical problems in our set-up; we'd struggle to fence the two halves of the family apart but still give them access to all their other needs and the gander, so we are just keeping a watchful eye. We will cross those bridges when (and if) we come to them.

Happy Birthday to me. I am told it is also the anniversary of the Titanic hitting the iceberg; that happened not long before midnight on the 14th and Titanic sank on the 15th. So now you know.

Charm Offensive?

The books we read on the subject all have geese as being delightful pets who form lovely and fascinating relationships with their humans and bring joy and happiness to your small holder life. Our three sheep became great friends who would eat out of our hands within days of being here and follow us around, come when called and each had a different personality (OK, I'll grant you the word 'pet' may not strictly apply, given the outcome for them, but I'm not going there today).

So, it has caused me a small amount of distress, that the three geese we bought, Goosey, Goocie and Gander seem to be playing hard to get. They were quite nervous of us when they first arrived and waddled off in the other direction as soon as they saw us, spending most of their time at the 'far end' of the orchard. We then upset them some more by Simon and I grabbing them one evening, one after the other to trim their wings amongst much annoyed and frightened honking and scurrying about in the shed. They were looking at me even more 'old-fashioned' the next morning; they definitely did NOT want to know us!

There was nothing for it if we wanted to form any kind of bond, but to start a gentle, patient charm offensive. This we have been trying since late January. We are very quiet around them, with no sudden movements. I have been creeping slowly up to them with a hand full of grain doing a two-tone whistle which they should come to know as a 'food' signal, throwing the food down near (but not 'at') them where they can clearly see it and then retreating a distance to watch. I have also been feeding them when ever they do something good, like obediently go back into their calf house for the night.

They are slowly, slowly coming round. After 3 weeks they will now race towards me as I appear and whistle, though they never get closer than about 10 feet. They will, eventually be eating out of our hands, I am sure and even allow themselves to be handled (all be it, I know they get a bit less willing during the breeding season; we have been warned to go careful with the girls if Gander is being protective, and go very careful with the geese around eggs or goslings). I will update you with progress on this love-bombing as it happens.

No such problems with the pups of course, and here is a nice picture of them gathered round the range, maybe feeling a bit cool in their newly shorn, short coats.

You can't make an Omelette...

I had a nice surprise this morning when waking up the live-stock, our first goose egg. Thank You very much Goosey or Goocie. The girls have a lovely hay box in their calf house in which I optimistically (and rather naively) thought they might make a nice nest and lay their eggs all clean and attractive looking. No such luck. Geese are, by their very nature, mucky beasts who have no respect for nice housing or bedding and tend to mess everything up by splashing their water about and poo-ing in their beds. I suppose it comes from normally 'roosting' in nature, out on the open water or in some muddy winter field where it didn't matter. So this lovely egg was dropped carelessly onto the wet poo-ey concrete of the calf house floor and needed a bit of a spruce up before I took its picture.

It weighs, we were interested to find, 110 g which is not quite twice what our chicken eggs weigh (around 64 g) so it's a bit big for the toast soldiers but would be great in omelette, or the Spanish Tortillas which we love and eat frequently here, and they are supposed to be excellent in cooking and baking. We also hear from Mentor Anne that there is a guy in town happy to sell any surplus we might produce through his little green-grocers.

Anyway, nice one girls (and the boy, I should add, who is marshalling and protecting them). We may reward them with a look at the orchard today; lots of lovely green Roscommon grass to eat and space to range in.

Goosey, Goocie Gander

Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn't say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs

Yes, Dear Reader, we are in the goose business with our first three generic farmyard geese, 2 geese and a gander. We'd been looking around in books and on the internet for some of a variety called 'Pilgrim' having read that they were gentle, quiet and in the 'light' category (as opposed to the huge, saggy-bellied, Toulouse or Embden "heavy" type). However Pilgrim proved to be (in Ireland anyway) a bit of a specialist pure-bred type which would be pricey (over €100 per bird) and might even need sourcing from Norfolk in the UK, so we gave up on that idea and decided to look for common-or-garden farmyard geese available locally through the on-line classifieds website "Done Deal.ie"

So this morning saw us driving down to Rahara, just south of Roscommon town (about 40 minutes drive) with a big cardboard box and the cat basket in the car, not at all sure what we were buying, not 100% certain we'd be happy with the geese we saw and definitely a bit dubious about whether they would fit in our boxes. I had already gone onto the poultry advice forum on line to ask what I should be looking for in the way of clues to bad health or dodgy birds, warning bells etc. It turns out that geese are basically healthy and not beset by anything like as many issues (parasites etc) as poultry, so if I was after hybrid farmyard geese, as long as they were bright of eye and standing well on both legs, I'd be safe enough.

Well, they looked OK to us, so we paid our money and loaded them up, along with a bucket of the feed they'd been used to. They looked a bit muddy, but one thing we do know about geese is that they love to have water to wash themselves in and it didn't look as if they had had any down in Rahara, just mud and straw. The guy (quite a big sheep farmer by the looks) warned us to clip their wings as they'd be in a new place and might try to fly off in fright. We would therefore need to keep them indoors till we wing-clipped them.

We have set them up in the calf house with a crate of hay if they'd like to nestle down, a bucket of water and a bowl of the feed, and left them quiet to get over their journey. When we checked back on them we could see them reveling in the bucket of water, dipping their heads and letting the water run across their backs, shaking it about and making a lovely wet mess. We decided they might like a bit more water, so we have filled a crate to the brim and set up a 'stairs' of ash logs to climb up to get it. Tomorrow I will build them a run and let them have a bit of yard to look at (and their water-bath outside)

Mentor Anne and Simon called by and showed us how to wing-clip them. They were not happy about being handled, but this doesn't hurt them, you just clip across the 'upper-arm' and 'fore-arm' main feathers (leaving the long feathers on the 'hand' because that helps them defend themselves in case of a fox or dog attack). This tells them that they cannot fly because they can feel out of balance as soon as they flap their wings. Now we can make them an outdoor run without risk of them taking off, which they can easily do while young and light. We are told that once they know the place and are used to us this becomes less of a problem and , anyway, a fat, fully grown geese is nothing like as aerially minded as a rangey youngster.

We have called them Goosey, Goocie and Gander because it would be silly to give both the girls the same name, wouldn't it? :-) . Goocie has some black feather in her wings. Our plan is to keep these three as our 'parent generation' and only eat their eggs or any progeny. These should not end up in the freezer; those who were concerned about our lambs and rabbits will be relieved to know.