Category Archives: goslings

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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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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