Growing a gaggle of geese

The exquisite beauty of birds of all kinds thrills my heart (as noted in my earlier blog post), and for as much as I love photographing seagulls and other seabirds, I grew up on a farm and among our menagerie, we also raised chickens. I had a pet chicken named "Chick." Wow! The creativity was really flowing when I was kid. We also had a dog named "Pup"...because she had so many...14 in one litter alone. And she was the dog we kept trying to get rid of. We'd put an ad in the newspaper to sell her (back in the days before Craigslist and such)...people would come and "buy" her from us, but always within a few days, no matter how far away the new owners would take her, "Pup" would always find her way back to our farm.

Well, I've gotten off track now with my rambling about "Pup"...that goes back decades in terms of memories...

But in more modern times (in the 1980s) when we lived on the little five-acre farm on the East Side of Tacoma, we had geese: Embden geese, the huge, gorgeous, whiter-than-white geese.


Linus and Lucy shepherding part of their gaggle of geese/goslings along in our pasture

We started out with just two that were given to us by Dr. Ted Rothstein, who lived in Bellevue, at that time, but has since relocated to Washington, D.C., and George Washington University. The pair of geese he gave us were named Linus and Lucy.

It wasn't long before Linus and Lucy were blessed as parents. Lucy laid a clutch of 17 eggs and every single one of them hatched. The goslings were precious. A couple of them didn't survive long, but the other 15 grew to maturity.

There is no end to the love story about these magnificent birds...

The geese were fond of chasing our horses out of the barn. Sometimes they'd clamp on to the horse's or pony's tail and take a wild ride almost like water skiing being towed behind a boat, one of the geese would hang on and not let go as the horse or pony would run wildly in circles around the pasture.

On one of those occasions, one of the geese sustained an injury to its webbed foot when the horse stepped on it. We kept that goose in the house (yes, our house, not the hen house) inside a shower enclosure for nearly a month where I administered hydrotherapy to the mangled foot with the shower spray, and fed the goose antibiotics and food via a funnel. If you've never had the privilege of administering medications and food to a squirming goose with a funnel in its throat, you really have missed out on something. After the first few times, the goose seemed to understand that what I was doing was intended as being helpful and it became cooperative and would even open his/her mouth to allow me to place the funnel without pulling away.

As time went on, the once gangrenous-looking traumatized foot returned to a healthy color indicating life in the tissue, and he/she was able to return to the rest of the family at that point in time. It was quite a thrill to have succeeded in restoring the bird to health.

Ordinarily, Linus, Lucy, and their offspring resided in the barn, but they were free to roam about the pasture or the creek that formed part of the perimeter of the property.

One year the kids and I went on a three-week vacation through Oregon, California, and Mexico driving South on 101 most of the way (part way on I-5), and then up through Death Valley and Mammoth Lakes, and on to Crater Lake on the return trip to Washington.

Neighbors looked after all of our pets while we were on the long road trip.

When we returned home, to our complete surprise, our gaggle of geese had moved out of the barn...and onto our front yard. There they all were: waiting for us to come home! What a welcoming party it was to be greeted by all of the geese. Interestingly, once we were home, the geese readily moved back to the barn on their own volition. It truly was as if they just wanted to be there to greet us on our return, as if to say, "We've missed you."