Goslings

Last night we had a fair amount of excitement with Kyora having found a family of Canada geese at the top of the front field and chasing the parents away while scooping up a gosling in her mouth. She decided not to come when called and that it was great fun to have Ron chase after her until he finally caught her and took it out of her mouth. Needless to say she was scolded and sent to her bed for the night.

At first Ron didn't think the gosling would survive since it lay on the grass panting, but after I looked at it and found no puncture marks and the back wasn't broken I wrapped it in a piece of flannel and we went to look for the parents, which we could hear calling for their baby.

They were across the road in a farmer's field but as soon as I entered the field they flew off. We went along the road to where one of the pairs of Canada geese had nested hoping to find them, but they were nowhere to be found, so we decided to take the little one that was starting to perk up and calling softly for its parents back home.











Before we arrived home we saw walking across the road at the bottom of the hill another gosling. So I got out of the vehicle and picked it up so it wouldn't get hit by a car and set it on the seat with its sibling. Getting almost to the top of the hill what should run out in front of us, but two more goslings which I caught and it was a good thing too as I was putting the fourth one into the car another vehicle came speeding over the hill in the opposite direction and would probably have run them over.

Now we had four goslings to look after for the night, so we put them in a large cardboard box lined with a bath towel, filled a dish with water and put some chopped grass and bread into the water for them and left them on the porch for the night.

In the morning they were all doing well and had eaten some of the food and almost all of the water was gone and even the smallest one seemed much better after its experience of being carried around in the dog's mouth. So I put them out into the child's pool that we have for the dog and added more grass and bits of bread.











We called the Peterborough Humane Society to see who would take in the goslings if we couldn't get them adopted by a pair of Canada geese that had goslings of about the same age and they gave us the phone number for Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge in Pefferlaw, Ontario.

After going through the Snelgrove Brook, over to Chemong Lake and then to the Peterborough Riverview Park and Zoo where you can almost always find geese (in fact they even have signs posted "DO NOT FEED THE GEESE") we managed to find one lone Canada goose, but no pairs or goslings.

So we made the trip to Shades of Hope and they felt that in another week or so that there would be many more families of geese and that they could successfully be adopted by another family.