Goose Who Runs with Dogs

Guest post/photos by Laura Kelsey

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The geese are training

Wings wide amid falling leaves

Tobias is there

The swans encircle

A lone feathered friend

Tobias is there

When the sun returns

A 'V' on the horizon

Tobias is here

Tobias Makes Friends

Tobias is having an interesting life right now.  It started a couple of weeks ago, when two geese landed on his pond and stayed for a short visit with him.  He's also been visited by mallards and wood ducks. Then, a few days later, a single goose came into our field and the two ate and wandered around the field, together but a hundred feet apart, for two hours.

That single goose (or maybe a series of single geese, how would I know?) has been back many times.  Each time it came, it got closer to Tobias.  Finally, it spent an hour or more just hanging out right beside our pond with Tobias, seeming quite relaxed while the dogs trotted around and I did the chores outside.

Yesterday, I looked up in time to see three geese landing in the field.  This time, I decided to try to get a picture.  By the time I had set up the camera (in the house looking through the window), there were six geese in total, and I had missed seeing  the others arrive. Over the next hour, the geese ate and moved from spot to spot.  I couldn't keep track of them to see if they stayed in the same groups or not.  Then, there were a bunch of skirmishes and, again, I couldn't tell if one particular goose was being either the victim or the aggressor.  Finally, a group of three flew off, then another single one, leaving two to continue eating.  I assume one was Tobias and the other was his friend.

A Tobias Update

He made it through the winter!  Tobias is still hanging around, but he's changing.  Our friendly gosling has become a sullen teenager.  His voice has changed, for starters.  Instead of saying, "hee, hee, hee," he now growls a deep, "huh, huh, ho."  He has also become moody.  One time when I go outside, he'll come over wanting to talk.  The next time, he'll hiss at me and bite.  Sometimes, he'll even jump up and beat at me with his wings.  (Luckily, he's just trying out this technique and isn't very sure of himself yet.)  It's a bit sad, but he is supposed to be a wild animal, after all, not a house pet.

I can see pools of water out in our snowy field, so the geese should soon be landing there.  Right now, the flocks are still small, and they fly up and down the creek south of our property.  Tobias tilts his head and listens intently as they go honking past.  A few days ago, he started to call a response once in a while.

This morning, I heard more honking than usual outside the house, and looked out a window.  There were two wild geese on our pond, only fifty feet from the house, where no geese have ever landed before.  Tobias and Charlie stood on the bank nearby.  Soon, Tobias went into the pond and floated there a few feet away from the wild couple for about fifteen minutes.  When they left, he flew with them, but he only went as far as the bottom of our field, then landed, called once, and came back to the pond.  First Contact!!!

I couldn't figure out how to rotate this picture, but I like it, so just look sideways!

Tobias Winter.mpg

There's a kind of soft quacking sound and a little splashing coming from the driveway area.  Tobias is in his little "pond" first thing this morning.  The night temperature stayed above freezing last night, and he's happy.  As I walk by on my way to the barn, I greet him, saying "ha, ha, ha, ha".  We learned to do that when he was a chick with his sister, many months ago.  After any separation, no matter how short, they would happily laugh together in greeting.  This morning, he laughs back at me, "hee, hee, hee", then goes back to dabbling in the pond for breakfast grain.

He takes off when I'm halfway to the barn and lands by the doors.  Most mornings, he'll spend several hours with the goats, eating hay with them and just hanging out.  Then he's ready to come back over to his pond for a nice, splashy bath and some corn for lunch.  We keep his water just slightly warm for him and he likes his grain best when he eats it out of the water.  He always appreciates a companion; luckily, our dog, Charlie, is his friend and sits near him in the driveway so that together they can watch the world go by.

We've been taking him flying as often as we can all winter, on warm days.  Sometimes, he flies along beside the truck.  (We have to keep our speed up around 40 mph or he passes us and then cuts in front of us.  At 40, though, he seems pretty relaxed; I think he could fly faster if he wanted to.)  Other times, we go along the creek on snowshoes and he waits till we get ahead a ways, then swoops past us and lands.

Obviously, Canada geese are meant to go south for the winter.   Tobias showed us that quite clearly.  He got bogged down in the deep snow, his feet were cold, he couldn't swim in the pond.  He seemed to adjust to the cold as the winter went on, but we can see his spirits lift with every rise in temperature.  Only a week or two more and his relatives will start flying over.  We're looking forward to seeing him start his proper goose life, but for now we're enjoying his company and storing up memories.

Tobias in the Basement



Tobias in his hot tub

Tobias spent the night in the basement.  When we got home from snowshoeing yesterday, he looked cold and miserable.  Charles picked him up and took him in.  (We know for sure that he's too cold if he lets us pick him up.)  We lit a small fire in the basement stove.  Even with the stove going down there, it doesn't get warm enough to hurt him; it probably reaches 2 or 3 degrees above zero near the floor where he is.

This morning, when I opened the door, I was greeted with a great flurry of "Honk! Honk!"s.  He hates having to be inside and was protesting.  I held the door open for him and he marched back out.  The outside temperature was -14.  By the end of the afternoon, he was cold and miserable again.  We kept his "lake" filled with tepid water, so he spent a lot of time in the "hot tub".  He'll probably have to go inside again tonight.

Only two months to go until the beginning of spring. 

Charlie and Tobias

Tobias' Lake

Tobias should have flown south for the winter, but at six months old, he's really still a baby, no matter how grown-up he looks.  He doesn't want to leave his family (us) yet.  He'll leave when the wild flocks come through in the spring.

In the meantime, all the natural water is frozen.  We put water out for him every day, and he treats it like a lake.  He likes to dabble in it and pick grains off the bottom. He'll sit beside it for long periods of time, then go wading or maybe have a bath.  Funniest of all, if something frightens him, he'll rush over and go sit quietly in the middle of the lake.  I suppose he feels safe there, surrounded by water that the predators will have to swim across to get to him.

Luckily for him, the dogs keep predators away from the shore of Tobias' Lake.