Just a quick update on the goose situation. We have snuck 6 eggs away from the Giant Dewlap geese and placed them in the incubator. It's only a small incubator, so half a dozen goose eggs is a bit of a squeeze. I'm not holding out much hope, but you never know.
But two nights ago we had a potential disaster.
Sue woke up at 6.30am to find that the electricity had tripped off. I had come up to bed at 12.30, which means that for up to 6 hours the eggs had no heat.
I asked for advice on a Facebook group (Goose, Goose, Gander) and the unanimous opinion was that they should still be okay. Two reasons. One, the centre of the egg should retain warmth for that long. Two, unlike chicken eggs, some people even advise cooling goose eggs for a short period every day.
We'll see.
We've also been stealing the eggs from the Embdens' nest for our own consumption and replacing them with Giant Dewlap eggs.
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| The nest is now large enough for two to sit |
I don't know whether geese can count, but they seem to sit once they get up to about 18 eggs. Since the girl Embdens were coming under a bit too much mating pressure, we've now stopped taking eggs from their nest and in the last few days they have started sitting. Last year their efforts came to nothing, so we're not building our hopes up this year either. It's just that right now we have quite enough goose eggs to be going on with and it's better to let the girls sit.
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| Don't come any closer! |
