Category Archives: geese

More gosling sights and sounds

Goose egg on contact microphone

Goose egg on contact microphone

The goose heart starts beating before it hatches, as I found out listening to an egg with a contact microphone

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So far we have 14 baby goslings, and two eggs from the final batch (from our own breeding geese) are starting to “pip” (break through the shell, as you can see in the photo of the egg on the microphone above).

Joanne picks grass grass for the younger ones, who are still inside in a special insulated and heated pen, several times a day from our back garden.

before

at 7am Joanne serves our baby goslings breakfast in bed ….

And here is the sound of baby geese with a whole load of fresh grass – life doesn’t get better than this!!

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after

… and a couple of hours later they’d like some more, please!

They have baby gosling crumbs to eat too, but they prefer grass!

Meanwhile the eldest of our goslings, who are growing up fast, went outside in our back garden for the first time today! They are in a specially heated and glass covered home and run (they are still little!) but they just loved picking their own fresh grass…

Safe in their heated, glass covered home...

Safe in their heated, glass covered home…

oooh - grass!

oooh – grass!

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Incubating the goose eggs and raising humidity for them

Unlike chickens, geese are waterfowl, and the shell on goose eggs is very thick. People recommend a higher humidity towards the time of hatching for goose eggs, so we needed a way to know what the humidity actually was.

A gosling breaking otu of the shell

A gosling breaking out of the shell

I developed a sensor that is connected to the Internet to make display easier, so here is the humidity of our gosling incubator

humidity of the gosling incubator (this is %RH and the x-axis is time, over a 24h span)

Unlike temperature, controlling humidity is low-tech – bar towels soaked in water and a water spray.

High tech bar towels raising the humidity

High tech bar towels raising the humidity

 

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The sound and sight of our beautiful new goslings!

We have new baby goslings (still at my home for now, but they will come up to the farm in a couple of weeks or so…)

Goslings_sm

 

Richard kindly did this sound recording of them – don’t they sound sweet?!

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Our beautiful new geese

 

We think, though we’re not 100% sure, that our two white geese are boys. Many thanks to Rose and Eric for investigating this (and yes, it does include looking at their private parts!)

The Geese at College Farm Creeting St Mary yesterday

I really want to breed our geese, so it was time to find some girlfriends for our boys. I was planning to get a couple from our lovely neighbours at Lux Farm but foolishly I left it too late! So I was left with the crazy job of trying to track down a pair of live geese before Christmas! I tried the Suffolk Providore, who were very helpful (thank you!) and put me in contact with a producer who unfortunately couldn’t help either – their geese had gone too! Things were looking lonely for our two boys…

A quick call to CSA member Paulette, who took a look through her copy of the Suffolk Smallholder’s newsletter, and I was in touch with Caroline and Will of College Farm Creeting St Mary who had a couple of lady geese. After spending a day deciding whether they could bear to be parted from them, they called me back to say “yes”. They asked for a donation to St Elizabeth’s Hospice in exchange for two beautiful girl geese, that Richard and I fetched yesterday. My local coop, and CSA members Eric and Rose, kindly gave me a cardboard box for each of them – they won’t want them back, believe me – and our two ladies are now installed on the farm. I really must go see how they are getting on!

 

 

 

 

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Goslings at the farm

Our baby goslings are now in the electric poultry netting next to the chickens on the farm.

They are doing a fantastic job eating the grass and clover, and manuring the ground.

We are planning to keep two or three birds for breeding next year with the goal a “Christmas Goose CSA” in 2013.

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The goslings are here!

Welcome to the world, Snowy and Frosty the embden goose hatchlings, one day old!

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