Baby Gosling is Spoiled Rotten!

I knew it would happen, our little gosling spends a fair bit of time out of the brooder and in one of our laps.  It doesn't matter if it is a he or she...this one won't be going anywhere...I can tell.  We just call it Baby Goose for now...it has a lot of personality for only being ten days old.  It is hard not to get attached to them, they are very cute, they will snuggle up to you, and "talk" to you.  I have two more goose eggs that are suppose to hatch on Saturday, it won't be too much longer and this little one won't be alone any more.  I need to learn how to sex them...so far we have 7 developing in the incubator.  I don't think I can not handle too many more males, as it is Loki can be quite a handful.  Thor is pretty gentle, I can feed him out of my hand and he doesn't chomp down on my fingers...Loki gets a bit crazy and will grab a hold of my fingers trying to get to the food in my hand, he chases Thor away and bites the top of his wing and holds on and runs with Thor trying to get away.

I took some pictures, I will try and see if I can figure out how to get them uploaded again so I can post them.  A video would be better I am sure...the little gosling likes to nibble on my husband arm hair, chest hair, grab ahold of your lip, nip an ear...and really likes biting the webbing between your fingers.  It is cute now, may not be so cute when it grows up.  Geese are pretty smart, and can be trained to go into their house, they love scratch grains and will come flying up the hill if they are in the bottom of the pasture...any time I come outside.  They know about when feeding time is too, they will stand at the back gate and call all the other critters to come to the fence and wait, I think they do it to alert me that it is getting late...it is time to eat, put your tools down now and feed us!  Lol, that is what I think they are saying anyway.  I work outside a lot when it is nice, so if they are hungry I don't get a whole lot done some days.  The geese leave me alone if it is not close to time for food, they love to play in mud puddles, swim in their pools, take naps in the sun.  Every once in awhile Thor will come find me, he talks to me softly, he is a good boy...I told him we were trying to get him some girls of his own, he hangs around with some of our ducks.  Geese are pretty good protectors too, they alarm on any perceived dangers, like a hawk flying overhead or a raccoon digging in the compost pile.  It is funny watching all of the chickens run for cover, the geese honk loudly and spread their wings and run in unison up the hill.  The turkeys start gobbling and flapping their wings too.  Sometimes it will be a huge blue Heron flying to the pond, but some days it is the family of Hawks we have living across the street...or very large buzzards.  We have a lot of Crows come into one section of trees behind the poultry yard in the evenings sometimes and they don't alarm on them.  They can be quite loud at times, the Crows.

I love my poultry, but sometimes they can be rather frustrating, they get underfoot a lot and I may step on a foot occasionally, the geese can honk so loud at times that it is hard to think and impossible to hear anything else, the turkeys steal tools, knock over boxes of screws and staples, take off with my gloves, bite me on the butt, nip my fingers when I am consentrating on building something...so, if you ever decide to get into poultry, I hope you have a lot of patience, you are going to need it!  I do enjoy sitting and watching them, their interactions, the graceful geese swimming in their big tank.  Our little white duck, looking up at us with her big blue eyes pleading for scratch grains or other treats, they are both a joy and a pain in the butt sometimes.

It is pretty cold here this morning, there is a pretty heavy frost on everything.  My husband said that all of the pools and waterers had about a quarter of an inch of ice on top, except the cattle tank. My husband drained the cattle tank and cleaned it over the weekend.  He started refilling it, but I finished filling it yesterday...maybe The water was just warm enough not to freeze?  I have two more pools to drain and clean out today.  Yesterday I mucked out the Duck and Goose house, the Sidecar/grow out pen, the Pallet Coop and removed some of the composted bedding from the run on the Big Coop.  I took out probably a ton of muck!  It took me all day shoveling it into my large garden cart and dragging it to different garden areas.  I think it was 12 very full cartloads, it supposedly can hold 600 pounds...I cannot pull that much up a hill, I put three cartloads in my front yard to till in when I create my garden area up front, and eight in my biggest garden area in the back of the poultry yard.  The chickens, ducks and geese will spread it out and I will till it in when it is time.  I have at least another ton of composted chicken manure in the run that I can use...I just have to get it out.  I usually put the spent pine shavings from the coop into the run, I use the deep liter method in most of my coops and have to turn it and add more regularly.

We Have A Hatchling!

I am so excited to report, our first goose egg started pipping on Friday January 8th the gosling made it out of the shell in just less than 24 hours and is doing well so far.  The bad part is because I saved several days worth of eggs and set them at once and that batch were not all fertile...it is alone.  I am sure it will become a pet, even if it ends up being a male.  It has already been held and cuddled, my husband wants it to be a girl so bad...I am sure he is probably trying to think of names already.  I do have more eggs in the incubator, but again saved some and set them as a batch.  They will not hatch for at least two more weeks.  The baby ducks are just over five weeks old now, and they are to big to put this gosling with right now.  Ducks and geese grow at an alarming rate, so this little baby may be able to go in the brooder with the ducks in about a week.

I have started just adding the goose eggs to the incubator as they are laid now.  I also sold two baby ducks, so I started another batch of duck eggs too...then after other people asked about ducks, I set another dozen a week later.  Ducks and geese are social animals and need companions, I feel bad that this little gosling has no companions to grow up with at this time.  I had set six goose eggs at the same time, but only one was fertile.  Normally a duck egg takes 28 days to hatch, a goose egg 30 days.  I will set up another incubator as a hatcher and when it is time to stop turning the eggs, or lockdown...I will move the ones due to hatch to that incubator.  It is not good to be opening up the incubator after lockdown.  I did assist this gosling in the hatching process, I was afraid I had shrink wrapped it by opening up the incubator to candle other eggs, add water...and additional eggs.  I took pieces off of the shell and pulled the membrane away from it's beak so it could breath before I went to bed the night before it emerged from the shell.  It was out of the shell the next morning.  Goose egg shells are thick, so it being my very first time hatching a goose, I didn't want to loose it.

When a chick, duck, gosling, etc.  gets shrink wrapped...the inner membrane adheres to them and makes it basically stick to them, as it dries out it can become either paper like or like cement if the moisture content inside the egg is high...like if the humidity on the day it pips is high from raining or too high of humidity in the incubator.  It can smother the hatchling...paper like is better, I think...less chance of drowning in the shell.  Too high of humidity makes the hatchling wet with a gel like substance (the white of the egg) does not dry out enough.  Some people call it "Sticky Chick" and if they incubator is opened after they pip the shell, that gel dries up and forms a cement like coating on the hatchlings down.  It keeps them from being able to turn in the shell to zip it open.  It can clog their nostrils and keep them from getting enough oxygen, they can smother and die without intervention...believe me, I know.  We have a lot of rain, I have assisted a lot.  I learned the hard way.

This is a learning process.  I have lost whole batches of chicks because they drowned in their shell.  I live in a high humidity area and was following the recommended hatching humidity in the beginning.    I had to adapt and learn the process own my own, to have it work in my location.  The first two batches of eggs I set drowned in the shell, even some of my later hatches were not good because of trying to find the right balance of humidity.  I have hatched eggs upright in egg flats, left them on the turner to hatch so that the air cell generally at the larger end of the egg was in a position that even if the humidity did not allow proper evaporation, that the hatchlings would survive.  I found that not all eggs have the air cell on the large end...how?  Well, experience...if you hatch in a carton and the egg in question has the air cell on the wrong end the hatchling pips and the remaining moisture leaks out and glues the shell to the turner or egg flat.  I have had it happen at least 4 times!  Not all of the hatchlings survived, because I did not know until I tried to remove the eggs.  I did save at least two.  But it is wise to candle the eggs before setting them into your incubator, that way you can make sure the air cell is right-side up and the eggs don't have any cracks in them.

Also, if you are hatching eggs make sure you set only the cleanest eggs with no damage.  I learned that if you get hatching eggs through the mail, and any break and coat the other eggs...bacteria grows and can get into the eggs that come in contact with it...it can cause birth defects.  Don't set eggs that have weak spots or wrinkled areas either, those areas light up well during candling.  This too I learned the hard way.  You can contaminate your whole batch of eggs putting one questionable egg into the incubator.   Always, always, always sanitize your incubator after each batch of eggs.  Just trying to share some of the information that I have found out, so you won't waist your time and money on failed hatches and deformed or chicks with special needs like I did.  I have two chickens on my back porch now that are blind in one eye, had my husband put down several that had such bad leg issues that no amount of doctoring on my part could help them and I still have two out in the yard one that has a spot in his eye and has poor vision in it and one with a deformed leg.  If he could not function on his own, he too would have been put down.

Everything Old Is New Again

I spent the end of the year working hard...but the pallet coop that I have been working on is now in use.  We had more rain and the door would not close so, I sanded the threshold until I was blue in the face...then decided just to take the door off, the metal support plates off, and the screws out that would interfere with cutting off a quarter of an inch...my hubby came home just in the nick of time, he did the actual cutting and helped me hang it back up.  I am not very good with a circular saw, so that was very helpful to me.  Since the door wouldn't close I didn't get the latch put on until then either.  I still need to put the hook latch on the inside, that way I can lock the door so the roosters can't get out when I am cleaning up in there.  Yes, it has happened, I have had escapes a plenty.  He helped me get the rest of the wire up at the very top of the coop too and build the roosts.  With his help we got it finished enough to put the roosters inside of it that were in the muddiest of the pens.

It is not a pleasant task catching roosters, but we caught 23 roosters and 1 turkey and got them moved to the pallet coop.  We were rooster wrangling in mud at least three inches thick...well, it is not all mud...a bunch of it was wet poop too.  Wet chicken poop stinks pretty bad.  Mixed with water and mud it makes for a very slick surface when you are running around trying to grab roosters.  I know I was slipping and sliding, got splattered and my boots covered in the muck.  During the wrangling my husband noticed the turkey's feet had blood on them.  We had to finish wrangling or rounding up all of the three pens that were the worst and get tools put up and feed all the poultry before it got to dark to see.

My husband started getting the tools put up and I started feeding them all...he also got the feed and water dishes out of the pens and washed them up and filled the waterers for the the new coop.  I got two of the wallpaper troughs and moved them into the coop and filled them with food.  A few of the roosters were sparring when I went into the coop.  I am hoping not to find any injured roosters when I go out to feed them in a bit, it is still dark outside...so I will probably go out in about half an hour.  I feed 4 -5 gallon buckets of fermented feed to my flock at the second feeding, it takes me awhile to do it because they are heavy and I basically can only carry two at a time.  That is why I use a lot of troughs, I have goat troughs too...it allows more chickens to access the food from both sides than the round feed dishes that I was using in the individual pens.  But most of the pens have only a handful of roosters in them.  

After feeding and getting the food mixed for fermentation.  I went an ran and prepared water to bathe the turkey and inspect him for wounds.  He was dripping blood from his feet when my husband put him on the roost in the new coop.  Since he was muddy, we thought it would be good to clean him up and see if we could figure out what was wrong.  He was very muddy, my husband did the initial clean up, but the turkey was flapping wildly and not being very cooperative.  It was the first bath either of us had given a turkey...I have given a few baths to chickens, however...a 25 pound turkey is a bit different.  He seemed to calm down considerably once we got him out of the bus tub and into deeper warm water.  He just laid down in the water and let me wash him well.  I could not see his feet though...or his chest.  I could feel he was missing a lot of chest feathers.  I am pretty sure that had to do with sleeping on the pallet in the pen, I didn't have a roost set up in that pen for him.  He had three rooster companions too and the roosters looked clean except for their feet.  When a bird gets wet, their feathers come out pretty easily, it is kind of like when you process any poultry, a quick submersion in hot water loosens the feathers enough to make them easy to pluck.  Well, it is the same way when you give one a bath too.  You have to be careful how you handle them or you will end up with hands full of feathers.

Anyway, after we got who I am now calling Mr. Peabody cleaned up.  I decided to try and blow dry him.  He didn't mind getting blow dried, but as big as he is, and as thick as his feathers are (except his belly/chest)...it may have taken me until this morning to get him dry enough to go back outside.  I had him in my lap and wrapped in towels for a little while.  He seemed like he was ready to sleep, he still had some mud on his eye area...that I noticed on close inspection.  My husband examined his feet and chest for me while I held on to him.  He was such a good boy during the majority of the bath and while in my lap.  We couldn't put him outside as wet as he still was, not with as cold as it was...so even though my husband went and put fresh straw out for him in a smaller dry pen...I decided to keep him in the house over night.  The only thing we had big enough and secure enough to keep him in was an extra large dog kennel.  Normally...meant for our dog Kensie to sleep in at night.  So, we took Kensie's things out, put a puppy training pad in the bottom of it and put the turkey in Kensie's kennel.  He has been good all night, was very quiet...I need to go get dressed and take him outside this morning.  We withheld food and water last night so he would not make too big of a mess.  So I am sure he will be thirsty and hungry this morning.  He did have the opportunity to eat...before we brought him inside...but, I didn't see him eat.

On another note...my goose that has been laying...and I have been putting all the eggs in the incubator since she started...some of the eggs are actually developing now!  One should be born January tenth, it looks like the three I set on December 24th are developing now too....I am excited, this will be my first hatch of geese!