It’s taken us a wee bit of time to recover from Sunday.  You see we lost two out of three of our new goslings.  This is what happened: On Saturday night, we performed Operation: Move Mama Goose from bush with goslings to safe house.

We did our usual kidnapping and bundling and moved them to a nice luxury nest in the Zen garden coop.  We cleared everyone out of the place so that she would have the place to herself.

The new baby goosies:

Of course, Geese don’t take kindly to being moving about and the next morning she was making a racket.  She had free reign of the entire coop with water, greens and grains but she wouldn’t have any of it.  She kept on pushing against the fencing and incessantly complained the whole morning.  The three little goosies were just following her about and were not perturbed by her fussing and complaining.  Occasionally, I would cast an eye over to make sure that the babies were doing okay.  The last time I looked was about midday and everything was in order.  At about 1pm, it started raining so I decided to run outside to make sure that the baby goslings had found shelter.  And lo and behold, mother was there with no goslings!!  Arrrgh!!!  Deep Shock…where were the babies???  I called Gnome and we searched the entire coop looking for the babies and couldn’t find any trace of them.  Mama was so distressed and kept on crying out…

We eventually opened the coop and let her out because she was just going crazy.  She ran back to her original nesting spot and plonked herself down, refusing to move.

We again scoured every inch of the coop…still nothing…

Was it a hawk?  What could take away three baby goslings without leaving a trace?  We did deduce that it wasn’t our cat because he had an alibi…he had been asleep inside the house all day.

We finally decided to get Mama goose back into the coop in the hope that she could call the babies and perhaps they would miraculously appear.  Anyway, she did her calling and Gnome thought that he heard some peeping noise coming from the cardamom bush in the coop.  He went over to investigate and meanwhile, I walked around the coop again and found the bodies of two of the dead babies.  They both had similar injuries to the head like they had been grabbed by the head and shaken back and forth.

Gnome found the third one…luckily, still alive and uninjured.  Thank Goodness!!

Anyway, we both agreed that the dead bodies of the goslings were not in the coop at the beginning of the search.  How did they mysteriously appear in the coop midway through the search?  After thinking about it a bit more, we realised that we had both left the coop to retrieve the mother and during this brief moment, the culprit must have snuck into the coop and performed the wicked deed.

So who was it Sherlock Gnome and Munchkin??

It was the dasdardly drake:

He was the only one who could get in and out out of the coop because he has discovered a secret weak spot…the rest are too fat to get through..  I recalled to Gnome that I  saw the drake sitting next to the cardamom bush when I had run down to check on the babies.  He quickly scarpered and I forgot about him in the ensuing confusion.

Oh dear, that means that the babies were probably still alive at the beginning of the search?? But we lost them when we both exited the coop.

The remaining baby gosling has been put in with the two older goslings in the safety of the guinea pig cage.  Everything has quietened down and mama has already forgotten, thankfully.

Well, it’s up to these two to look after the new baby goosie!!