Tag: geese

June 2nd – Spotted this interesting family on the canal near the Canoe and Outdoor Centre in Brownhills. I’m interested in what’s going on here. One pair of canada geese, Eight goslings, perfectly normal. Except five of the brood are clearly a week or two older than the other 3. Do geese have reciprocal childcare arrangements? Fostering, perhaps?

Any ideas?

Christmas day – Chasewater was unusually quiet, even for Christmas day, which is normally quite busy with walkers and families taking the air. I couldn’t resist seeing if the geese were still feeling obstreperous, and they didn’t let me down. I’d love to know where they came from…

December 23rd – Here’s a warning: beware of muggers at Chasewater. These five geese – who seem like domestic escapees to me – have been living on the boating lake near the Innovation Centre since mid-summer. Ratty, noisy and aggressive, they make the Canada Geese around them look somewhat timid. Today, as I cycled past on my return, their bellies were clearly empty due to a lack of visitors. They hustled toward me, flapping and honking, and realising I had no food, set about pecking my feed and bike. Geese are mad and stupid – I always thought that if you could somehow cross one with a chicken the result would be truly psychotic.

September 9th – on a late afternoon visit to Chasewater to check out the dam works, I was greeted by this small but rowdy group of pure white geese. Aggressive in the usual way, the honked and hissed at me for a while before returning to their previous activity of cropping the grass. I’m not sure what kind of geese they are – they look domestic, but are they snow geese perhaps?