JuneOntario's blog: THE BABES IN THE WOOD

One day this summer, a group of twenty-three Canada geese walked across the road from the property of one of our neighbors and made themselves at home on our pond, to the annoyance of our resident two pairs of geese and their eleven offspring. The newcomers were a mixed bunch of all ages, including two very small goslings that did not belong to any of the adults. These two babes must have wandered off, attached themselves to the wrong crowd, and in the process lost their parents. The babes hung around on the fringes of the flock, wanting to be accepted, but although their presence was tolerated, they were pecked by both adults and goslings if they got too close to a family unit.

In due course the adults of the flock regrew their flight feathers after molting, their offspring grew their first flight feathers, and flying lessons commenced. Day by day, the parents increased the height and time they took their children aloft, until one day the whole lot of them flew off and didn’t come back. The two lost goslings, though, had not yet fledged and were left behind.

The abandoned goslings behaved like a male and a female (one was large and prone to standing watch, while the other was demure and petite) and so I named them Hansel and Gretel. The babes stuck together, and when they eventually fledged, Hansel and Gretel began taking little practice flights every morning. They would make one or two circuits of the pond, never rising above the trees surrounding the water, and then come in to land. Gretel was particularly bad at landing, usually taking a nose-dive as soon as her feet hit the water, but she gradually improved.

In mid-to-late August, a new pair of adult geese arrived. Hansel and Gretel immediately began following the adult female around, and since they were not rebuffed I hoped that the youngsters would be adopted. They all spent the day amicably together and then, as evening fell, the adults prepared to fly off and Hansel and Gretel showed every intention of leaving with them. After a lot of honking and false starts they all got facing in the same direction and began take-off across the pond. At the pond’s edge, the adults ascended steeply to rise above a willow tree and the house behind it, but Hansel and Gretel could not gain enough altitude to clear the obstacles and turned back to land on the pond. The adult pair did not return for them. The babes had been abandoned again.

What will become of Hansel and Gretel? Without adult geese to encourage them to fly higher and farther, will they ever develop the strength to leave? Fall is not far off now. All I can do is feed them a little corn to give them energy and hope that more adults will turn up, adopt them, and take them south.

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