We hatched three goslings in our incubator and have been raising them in the house, so when I come down in the morning and turn on the lights the first thing they see is me. I took them outside to get some exercise today and even though the adult pair of geese were nearby they just followed me around wherever I went. You can hear the adult geese calling to them and the babies just ignored them, they didn’t even seem to realize they were out there.
I had to be careful not to step on them.
Raising poultry on your kitchen table is just one of those fun things. Dumbass yard birds never seemed to imprint on us, but we haven’t tried waterfowl.
Kind of a cuteness overload right there
😂👍👍👍
Are there only three, Art? Or do you have any still in the incubator?
Geese are awesome. I’ve found I had to introduce them to my UPS driver, so they’d allow deliveries.
Really cuts down on political visitors (inset mock sobs here LOL).
It’s funny to watch my dog sleeping with the geese guarding him.
We don’t have geese, but we do have ducks and we find them very entertaining. The geese we had in Idaho were pretty rowdy and we had so many various birds then, we never noticed any bonding.
Homesteading sounds kinda spartan and like a lot of work, but the reality is once you find yourself awash in new life be it baby ducks, chicks, new puppies or newly sprouted beets and potatoes and sapling fruit trees bearing their first few peaches or apples, it makes the imagination of living life away from the farm very distasteful.
Don’t wanna harsh this thread, but this is just too damned good. On the subject of birds, I received the usual weekly email from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology this morning. It had a link under Bird News and Resources which read, “Black Birders Week 2025 Starts Today: We always look forward to important and thought-provoking conversations at this annual, virtual event.”
Clicking on the link to see what Nature-loving niggaz finna do for Black Birders Week, I was taken to a site with the address www[dot]blackafinstem[dot]com* which I thought had to be a Babylon Bee parody (it is not). The circular logo on the main page is (I shit you not) a menacing raised black power fist holding the strap of a pair of binoculars, and it reads around the outside: “Black Birders Week / Black AF In STEM”.
The Upcoming Events listing for today, Sunday, includes “Anniversary of Murder of George Flyod [sic]” and “Anniversary of Central Park Incident”. Tomorrow’s festivities consist of “Female Bird Day & Community Building within Black Women Leadership Spaces” with “Speakers: Sam DeJarnett (Always Be Birdin’ Podcast) and Indigo Goodson-Fields”.
In my own admittedly limited experience, I thought that the only birdwatching homeboys do is at KFC, which often devolves into a mini-riot over dipping sauces. Little did I know in my ofay ignorance that da bruthas and sistas be so attuned to Nature an’ sheeiit.
So I wish my homies a righteous and mostly peaceful Black Birders Week and hope that serious non-White ornithology aficionados across the nation (all four of them) manage to survive these virtual events without undue oppression. I’ll be gnawing a chicken bone in solidarity with the bird-loving scholars while watching the turkey buzzards over my ranch through a pair of stolen field glasses, contemplating fond thoughts of all that the negro community brings to STEM in their Black AF-ness. Look for me this coming Friday at the “Virtual Sensory Workshop w/ AfroFuturism Collective” hosted by Nicole Jackson & Deja Perkins.
(*Seriously, check out this genuine link and all the self-consciously hostile blackety-blackness that is central to “Black AF In STEM”. I howled with laughter.)
You owe me a keyboard, I really felt that was a joke, but God save me, it’s not. Truly funny, if unconsciously so.
If you haven’t yet read Konrad Lorenz, do yourself a favor and try any of his books. He is a hoot to read, with a very sharp sense of humor, and probably the major scientist of imprinting (he studied Greylag Geese). Hopefully, your goslings can socialize with other geese, but you are irrevocably imprinted as “Momma”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Lorenz
Imprinting . . . successful.