Written by Lynda Myers.

“The neighbors know when we collect the eggs. When they hear the boy geese scream, they run to their windows and watch as we try to escape. We provide the neighborhood with lots of entertainment!” So reports Alessia, our partner in Ukraine, describing her experience as a refugee-from-Kyiv turned poultry farmer.

Alessia, city-reared, knew nothing about raising poultry, but others in the village, like Yehven, have been very helpful. Geese are more resilient than other birds, but last summer, when Alessia first received her geese, 6 fledglings died in 2 days and it looked like she would lose them all. Yehven came to the rescue by instructing her to mix vodka into their water. “What? What? Vodka??? 🤨 🧐 🤔 😳”

Alessia and her family are staunch teetotalers. Where could they even FIND alcohol without ruining their reputation with neighbors? But Yehven insisted the alcohol would destroy the microbes that were killing them. She remembered there was alcohol in the medical supplies they received, so she mixed some in their water. Soon, the geese wobbled, tottered, lay down with stretched out legs, slept—and woke up fine. The whole village laughed about the incident: a victory for an age-old home remedy and the corruption of their favorite family!

Alessia was delighted to discover that geese are inexpensive to raise, preferring to get most of their calories from grass—though if Alessia’s greedy ganders aren’t given extra corn they raise a ruckus all night, keeping awake the neighbors, who tease her, “Are you starving those poor goose boys?” Poultry-raising handbooks warn that geese are extremely noisy and unsuitable for keeping in residential areas unless you want to drive your neighbors nuts, so Alessia’s neighbors must be very forgiving.

It’s fairly easy to grow your own gaggle of geese: The females are excellent mothers. They lay eggs during the spring, usually one every day or two, until they have a clutch of 6-8, then they go broody, and stop laying. But if the eggs are removed each day, the geese will continue to lay. So, if you want more than 5-6 hatchlings, you must collect the eggs and incubate them. And Alessia needs many more than that in order to give chicks this spring to new refugee families. 

And herein lies the rub, because ganders are temperamental and highly territorial. Alessia reports, “The boy goose runs at us and hisses, screams and bites when we try to take the eggs. We have learned to wait until he has walked away from the girl goose and is distracted. Then we try to quietly get the eggs. But when he sees we have them he chases us. Every day we collect eggs, and every day he becomes angrier and runs faster. It is getting harder and harder to escape without breaking the eggs. We provide our neighbors with lots of entertainment. The boy goose used to let us pet him, but now even if we just come with water or grain he tries to chase and bite us. He doesn’t love us anymore, that’s for sure.” 

Conventional wisdom is that paternal instinct drives the boy goose to protect the nest—but there’s another possibility: When the female is laying, he must work five or more times a day to fertilize the developing eggs. This goes on until the clutch is complete and she begins to brood. Perhaps the gander wants the clutch completed so he can finally get a rest!

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