This is the week of babies. One of our Cuckoo Maran hens has been sitting on a clutch of eggs and most are hatched. We will get Americauna chicks Friday. And today our goslings arrived, from California no less.
I have been interested in geese because they appear to be a great sustainable meat source. After they are about a month old, they primarily eat green stuff. They don’t need lots of commercial feed. I can conceivably grow enough wheat (or buy Essex organic wheat) and soybeans, and roast the soybeans in the oven, for feed for goslings and overwintering. The only downside is that they take a couple of years to mature before they lay fertile eggs. We have started these early enough this year that maybe they will lay next year, but we can’t count on it.
We got two types of geese, both of which are on the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy’s critical list: Pilgrim Geese and American Buff Geese. Both have nice dispositions (at least for geese), which was important since we have a neighbor who is afraid of geese. And they are both pretty quiet. Both breeds are American in origin, from the 1930s and 1940s.
The babes are soft, sweet, and make wonderful sounds. They devoured a couple good-sized chunks of dirt with grass and weeds today.
For those who wonder how we get chicks/ducklings/goslings shipped to us, fortunately both the biology and the logistics work well. First for the biology: Just before baby birds hatch they absorb the yolk and white into their bodies. They can live off this for several days. In nature, not only may it take a day for them to dry and get their legs enough to go out scratching for food, but the first to hatch have to wait a day or two for their nest mates to all hatch. So, the goslings hatched Sunday night/Monday morning and were taken to the USPS airport facility. They flew across country, then boarded post office trucks and arrived at the Peru Post Office about 5 a.m. Wednesday morning. We received a call at 7 a.m. telling us they were here, and Tony went over and got them. All are healthy. No one was starving or dying of thirst, though by midmorning they had all figured out what water and chick starter are. And when I took them some chunks of sod and dirt, and later some lettuce from the hoophouse, they instinctively knew what to do.
Here is a size comparison of a fairly large breed chicken chick and a gosling, both hatched Sunday/Monday:
