We Got Goosed Monday

Late Monday afternoon I got a call from GG that the Canada Geese were down at the pond. Of course I grabbed the camera and hurried over to get a few shots.

Some years the geese are regular visitors showing up at certain times of the day to feed along the banks and cruise the pond. Normally it would be limited groups or maybe a family with the mother and father and 4-6 young ones. Some years we get a flock with up to 25-30 geese coming. They particularly like to ease over intothe nearby pasture to feed on the grass. Oddly enough the horses are usually tolerant of just a few geese, but when there are too many I have sometimes seen the horses actually slowly herd the geese out of their pasture. It's their grass after all.

This year the geese haven't been around as much it seems. For several weeks during the spring we would see geese daily traveling back and forth between other lakes and ponds in the area. Normally there would be just 2 at the time, but sometimes up to 8-10. Only seldom did they stop for a visit, but at times they would drop by the pond across the road to feed in the grassy areas around the pond. Then for maybe 6-8 weeks we didn't see them even flying over which seemed a bit unusual. We even discussed their absence, but we didn't really make a connection to the probable reason until we saw these visit.

It is likely the local geese weren't traveling around because they were busy with their new offspring. The mother normally tends the eggs during incubation while the father tends to stay around to guard the nest and family. For some time after hatching the goslings are not able to fly and take extended trips so it is only logical we would not see them. A little research revealed that during the spring/summer (and/or during the incubation and early weeks of the new goslings) the adults of some species even lose their flight feathers causing them to remain in the area around their nest. Of course we don't have a significant number of geese that nest in our area as most continue north into Canada for breeding.

Now all of a sudden the geese had reappeared. Evidently they had been there for some time when GG happened to spot them. Parts of the pond had so many small white feathers around the edge that it looked like a pillow had exploded.

This particular group looked like it could be a family group, but the younger ones were nearly grown as they were almost as large as the leader which I presume was the father. It is a bit difficult to tell the males from the females as they are almost identical. The male tends to be a little larger and heavier, but the difference is only about 10%. The leader of this group was definitely the decision maker and all the others just followed along as you can see below.
I took a few photo's but was hesitant to approach the geese too closely as I wanted them to become at ease with having a human around the pond hoping they would continue to visit in the coming days. They stayed around for quite some time before deciding to take flight and check out some other location. Or perhaps it was just time to go home for the evening. (Check out the character on the left looking around. Just like with humans there is so often one silly goose that wants to mess up a good group photo.)

Oh yeah. The green herons were back for a visit Sunday. We had all 3 of them this time. They didn't stay too long as there were human visitors around, but I did get close enough to get a few shots of them. Perhaps this one was too busy concentrating on the dragonflies on the stick nearby trying to figure out how he could score a quick snack. I guess he didn't pay as much attention to me as he normally does. (Although the photo doesn't show them well there are at least 3 dragonflies of different types on that stick. That's not a common sight to have 3 of them perched so close to one another.)