We live on a pond.
One of the benefits of that is the great abundance of wildlife we get to experience in our own back yard. In the nearly five years we've been in our house, we've had raccoons, deer, coyotes, and muskrats roam through the yard. Naturally we have mallards and wood ducks on the pond. The city's annual water treatment ritual of bagged barley pellets provides excellent "seating" for turtles to sun themselves on. Dragonflies are incredibly abundant, and we frequently see bats out at dusk (we made the mistake of leaving the umbrella out on our picnic table last summer; needless to say a bat or three took up residence inside it and the guano made for a messy cleanup job). However, our pride and joy, has always been the gaggle of Canada geese that return every year.
Yes, you read that right, we love our geese. From the first honks announcing their arrival from someplace warm in March (we like to think they winter in Disney World, after all, we like to winter in Disney World ourselves) until the last honks as they fly back south in the fall, we love them.
To most people, Canada honkers are a nuisance, making a mess of the lawn, but for us they've almost become pets. They get their share of cracked corn (although with the price of corn nearly doubling over the last two years, their share has shrunk). We can walk out in the midst of the family and they don't run away from us. Yes, Gordy (the patriarch, and the biggest, meanest goose God ever made) will hiss at us, but I don't hesitate to get within a couple feet of his beak and hiss back. We can be out working in the garden and they'll come up and check out what we're doing.
And they're smart. They know full well where we hang out in the house, and if the corn piles have been eaten they know that standing within view of the windows where we're at will easily guilt us into putting more corn out for them. They also know that we're very protective of them. We've chased off convicts sentenced to clean up the park we live on when the geese have been threatened. We even chased off an owl after dark that was coming dangerously close to the goslings this summer. The owl, my high-powered flashlight, and I had a "come to Jesus" type meeting at a range of about 50 feet, with the owl up in a tree and me standing down on the ground putting the flashlight on it.
This year, we had a new development out on the pond. Normally when the brood all comes back in the spring, Gordy insists on removing all of them from what he considers to be his pond. (Yes our house happens to be planted on his land as well, but since the corn-feeders are honorary geese, who didn't develop wings and masks, we are tolerated.) This year, however, there is another pair of geese that has taken up residence on the pond. We can only assume that one of these two is a hatchling from a couple of summers ago. Not only is this couple tolerated, but the goslings from Gordy and Gertie's clutch and this other couple's clutch frequently intermingle. Come the end of summer, we'll have a whopping 13 geese flying south for the winter.
We hope.
Last week, we noticed something very disturbing in one of Gordy and Gertie's babies. Both of its wings looked to be twisted outwards and flopping around. We wondered if they were broken, but figured that if that were the case only one would be that way. After some digging on the net, I came across (by pure accident) links describing exactly what we were seeing with our gosling. It's called Angel Wing, and results basically from malnutrition, wherein the flight feathers grow too fast for the bone and muscle structure of the rest of the wing to be able to support them. As a result the feathers flip out and if left untreated, will result in a flightless bird. What's worse is that we've been feeding these guys bread at the bottom of our deck stairs lately, and that seems to be a leading cause of the malnutrition at hand! We feel so terrible that we contributed to this!
For the last several days, bread feeding has been suspended, and we've tried (fruitlessly so far) to get the flock rounded up so we can capture "Angel" as the gosling has been named and take it to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota. This has not proved to be as easy of a task as one would assume (refer back to my comment above about geese being smart). First off, the adults are very much aware that something is wrong with Angel. He seems to be very protected by Gordy and Gertie, and we haven't been able to get the net clsoe enough to get a hold of him. In addition, they've started treating us very suspiciously since we started this wild goose chase. Tonight is going to be attempt number four. We think we have a plan involving the neighbor's fenced in yard (since the geese's natural instinct is to retreat to the safety of the pond). Hopefully we'll be able to get it out to the Wildlife Rehab Center before they close at 8. Given our last several experiences, we're not holding our breath.
At any rate, the basic treatment plan for this condition, while the gosling is still growing, is to basically put the bird into a sling and hold the wings up in place where they belong for a week and a half or so, changing the sling after 4-5 days. If we had an easier time of catching the little dude, we'd do the job ourselves, but we don't want to go through the trouble of trying to catch Angel 2 or 3 more times after we have the sling on the first time. As smart as they are we'd never catch it.
Hopefully, the note we're bringing along will convince them to release Angel back at our pond. After all, its not fair for the little guy to be taken from his family never to see them again.
So after all that rambling, what's the moral of this story? Geese are grazers. In fact, they are very good grazers. Bread, even whole wheat bread, is incredibly poor in nutrition for them. Many places have rules against feeding the wildlife, and many people who are lovers of these magnificent birds violate those rules thinking they're doing good, when in fact bread is far from good for them. Grains like cracked corn are much better for them. In reality though, while the goslings are still growing into adult geese, the best diet for them is to let them eat the food that is naturally around them. After all, thousands of years of evolution has made them quite efficient at digesting grass. Let's not mess with that.
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