If anyone has been following our posts, they will know that we unfortunately lost all our guinea pigs to a pesky possum (that we subsequently made into curry possum) and as a result of this, we lost our crèche for the goslings.

So, this year I ended up with the task of rearing the goosies from Day 0 to adolescence (3 to 6 months). Note that Goosie Mothers are usually not the best of mothers and they can be quite haphazard in their approach.  That’s why I volunteered to raise the geese.

I thought that it was useful to note the differences in rearing the goslings personally and the lessons that I have learned from these last 6 months.  Yes, goosie breeding/hatching season has come to a close and the reign of wrathful, goosie terror has ended.  🙂

Goosie Lessons.

The goslings, this year, were raised on high protein (combo dog food and cooked black beans).  Their food dish was continuously topped up so that they had access to food continuously for the first 3 weeks.  I had to teach each one to eat the food initially by sticking its beak in the food and tapping on the food dish with my finger (to mimic the beak of a mother goose).  There was one batch of goslings that refused to “take” to the food and I had to end up giving them milk.  That was a horrible experience because they splashed and sploshed about in milk covering themselves from head to tail; it got quite disgusting and smelly and I am not sure if they even got to drink any of it!

At day 7 (later when they got too horribly noisy and smelly it was shifted to day 3) they were moved from the fish tank in the house to a welded wire cage outside.  At this point, as-well as the usual food, they were introduced to all manner of greens so that they could get used to eating the variety of weeds around the house.  I noticed that although well protected, the cage afforded the little geese the opportunity to observe their environment (ie. lots of rowdy, trouble-making adult geese) without feeling threatened.  This is actually a significant point to make because the guinea-pig raised geese were kept in shallow concrete houses and when they were set free around the farm, they were very easily upset and frightened; so much so that it took them six months to find the confidence to graze away from the house area.

After day 21, they were big enough to be transferred into a metal movable cage.  They were allowed to roam free during the day and were herded into the cage in the evening with a big bowl of high protein food.

After about day 35, they were allowed to roam free without needing to go into the cage at night.  By this time, they were about the size of a chicken (4 to 5lbs) and could fend for themselves…even get nasty with the drake.  Their weights were consistently increasing  with continuous grazing.  I still gave them protein titbits in the morning and evening to get them into a routine of friendly, rumbustious behaviour.

I kept a diary with food weights and goosie weekly weights.  With each batch, I was actually able to improve on weight gain and towards the end, I was able to double weight gain every 7 days.  Thanks to Gnome for encouraging me to be more scientific and methodical; this has allowed me to improve, tweak and make adjustments to turn my geese into healthy, happy birds.

Conclusion:

The new Munchkin Mum method has been positive and yielded better results than the previous guinea pig rearing.  This year’s geese are a lot bigger, friendlier and happier.  A happy goose goes a long way!  The energy and time that I put into the goslings was definitely worth it and I gained a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction from the whole experience.  So much so, that I am ready to do it again next year.

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