Farm Journal: Poultry Disasters

That’s it. I’m never leaving the farm again.

All right… not really.

But Michael and I just got back to the farm after a whirlwind weekend trip to Florida for a friend’s wedding, and oh. Oh, boy. Yikes.

We prepared as best we could, given the really unfortunate timing of Dumpy’s eggs starting to hatch on 17 May, literally the day we had to leave. We absolutely knew some of the babies would get snatched by predators if we let her stay on her nest with no overhead protection, so we made the risky decision to move her nest somewhere safer. We butted the “gosling tractor” up to the hoop coop, where the other goose and her babies were already living, and made a nest of sawdust and shredded paper. Then we moved the pipping eggs and the one living duckling to the new nest, and closed Dumpy into the tractor with them. The hope was that she would settle down, get lured back to the nest by the peeping of the duckling, and once she was calm, we would open the tractor up so she could access the larger space, food, and bathing water of the hoop coop.

It started off rough. Right away, Dumpy’s mate, Loudmouth (AKA the Spokesgoose) went absolutely ballistic, beating himself violently against the pen walls and causing general havoc, until we shut him up in the tractor with her. But far from calming down, the two of them just spent the next couple of hours standing and honking together. Dumpy didn’t show any interest in her nest or her desperately peeping baby.

We needed to see if we could safely open the tractor and let the two families mingle. We tried. And the answer was no. Loudmouth immediately began tackling and biting the older goslings. Dumpy was also more interested in the other goose’s goslings than her own nest, but at least she showed a more benevolent attitude. We evicted Loudmouth and reinforced the pen walls to keep him from battering down the temporary endwalls, which were made of bird netting. But we couldn’t leave Dumpy confined to the tractor for several days because we didn’t have enough devices to automate a third waterer, and we were running out of time. We left her with access to the main hoop coop and crossed our fingers that she would settle down despite all the stress, return to her nest, and care for her poor babies.

As you probably already guessed, Dumpy got a failing grade for grace under pressure.

The good news is that all the goslings from the first hatching are healthy! (All five that survived the raven attack, I mean. And applying the term “healthy” liberally, in the case of Gimpy.) When I got home yesterday, I found Dumpy happily tooling around the hoop coop with the other mama goose and her brood. The bad news is that Dumpy’s whole clutch, including the one duckling that had already hatched, were still in the nest, cold and dead. We suspect that the older goslings satisfied the instinct that had just begun to tell her that sitting on eggs is over and now it’s time for peeping fuzzballs, and she defected to join the more interesting peeping fuzzballs. Damnit, Dumpy.  

That was bad news, but honestly, it wasn’t unexpected. We knew it was a longshot to move a goose’s nest when the eggs were just hatching. Dumpy is not bright at the best of times, even compared to the ducks, who are—let’s be frank—dumb as posts. In fact, we were amazed that she managed to incubate any eggs to the point of hatching at all. At least we know she can do that much!

The other bad news was unexpected, and was first evidenced by two big patches of feathers. The light-colored feathers of female Silver Appleyard ducks. One was clearly the victim of a bird of prey, who had plucked and eaten at the site of the kill and left a mostly eaten carcass. The other we suspect was a coyote who climbed the fence, killed the bird, and carried it away to eat. That pile of feathers was smaller, and the carcass was nowhere to be seen.

We feel awful that we failed to protect our flock. Thoughts on how to proceed will follow in a future blog post…

(Happily, there was another piece of good news: our cat, Aster, who had disappeared in the days leading up to our departure, reappeared! He had spent those several days outdoors. Miraculously, for a bright white indoor-only cat, he was no worse for wear. After the deaths in the poultry yard, I literally cried from relief. His brother, Argo, is busily cleaning him and catching up on missed cuddles, poor little guys.)