2 days to go to hatch and goose broke egg.

[livininbrazil]

Hi, I discovered today that my goose has broken an egg, the air-sac end. It has a live gosling inside. There´s quite a hole there, so i taped it to try to keep the humidity in. Is there anything abetter I can do to help it survivie until the right hatch day? The membrane is still intact.

 

[chooks4life]

You're welcome and I hope it's as handy to you as it has been to me. In retrospect, with the help of my animal journal, I can trace back issues that I had no early knowledge of throughout the generations. It's been invaluable. You could even start a thread on this forum recording your experiences. I'm sure many would find it useful.

Best wishes.

 

[chooks4life]

What tape did you use? How much of the shell did you cover?

If it's not a tape that has toxins in its 'sticky' ingredients, and you didn't cover too much shell, it might be fine. If I were you I would research what budgie breeders (etc) use on their eggs to patch them, because they often patch eggs for far longer than two days and still get hatches. Best wishes.

 

[livininbrazil]

I just used the sticky tape available here, no idea if toxic or not, and I put it on the smallest póssible amount of shell. Thanks for your response.

 

[livininbrazil]

Well, I found the gosling dead inside its flat shell, such a shame. Obviously that didn´t work. Maybe it would have been better to pop it under a lamp for the two remaining days, but there we are.
The goose has two more eggs, but I don´t know if there´s anything in them, as soon as I go near she makes such a noise that I can´t listen to the eggs. They are eggs I rescued from my potty 3 sisters geese who have all laid in the same nest and all 3 are trying to incubate. As I expect nothing will come of it, I popped 3 eggs under a more reliable goose, now I´ve lost one of them.
Not having a good year as I´ve already lost 3 goslings, don´t really know why as they were with the parents on grass,, just as last year. They died one-by-one over a period of about a fortnight. 2 died at night, I think they got cold, although the mother was with them. Trouble is I now have one one-month-old gosling which I took away before it died like the others, and its companion is its reflection in a mirror. If I put it back down with the others, it just cuddles up with the sitting goose and doesn´t eat, so I´ll have to raise it myself. The father gander watches over it beautifully, but doesn´t take it to eat grass, he´s too concerned with the sitting goose. And its mother seems to simply be a bad mother. She´s been going off looking for a new nesting site! I hope that the 2 eggs hatch so that the singleton gosling has some friends later, as I´m quite sure that the sitting goose will adopt this one once she´s off her nest. Last year all went so smoothly!

 

[RURU]

Year to year you never know what to expect on the geese laying eggs or even the hatch rate. It is always a surprise.

 

[livininbrazil]

I prefer the nice surprises! And as I don´t have much experience with the problems that can occur,(2 years running, no mishaps) it´s a nasty surprise when things go wrong, and goslings are just that bit more delightful. But I´m learning what works and what doesn´t. I think I should have brought the other goslings up to the house to rear, then they would probably have been fine, as the singleton is doing ok, but I´m concerned about future behaviour issues, so I put a duckling the same size in with her, she laid into it. So I put a bigger duckling in with her, twice the size. She laid into that, too. So that means even if the other eggs do hatch, I can´t let her be with those little goslings, so I´ve now fenced her mom in a biggish pen on grass, poor thing, and I´m putting the gosling out with her when it´s warm enough and bringing her in when the temperature drops. The mom doesn´t want to nurture her, but at least isn´t being horrid to her, so it seems to be the best of a bad job. It gets her together with other geese where she´s safe until she grows big enough to be with them all at night, too. (at the moment it gets down to about 3°C) Any ideas to improve what I´m already doing? I now think the others must have died because they didn´t have a very maternal mom. Interestingly, last year the other goose (gander´s favourite) hatched her youngsters a few days before this goose, so when the second batch hatched, she took over the care of all of them, and this mom (2nd best) just tagged along...now it makes sense. Will an under-goose not be such a good mom? What do you think?

 

[livininbrazil]

Just in case anyone should be interested in the outcome: the mom goose was desperate to get out of the pen, so I let her out and she headed straight for an old tyre with some grass in and laid an egg... she now has 3 eggs there. Moved on. The other goose that had the broken egg had one little one hatch, but wasn´t very interested in it, which surprised me, as I thought she was the better mom. She left it out of the nest, so I picked it up and am raising it. The 3rd egg was no good. So, I put the tiny gosling in for about an hour with the older one, not too bad, bit of poking but not really bullying, nothing like what it did to the ducklings! They´re now inseperable, tiny one tries to snuggle up, which older one is now letting it do. The month-old is turning into a dinosaur, but in spite of its size, there are no real problems between them. They sleep in a cardboard box ontop the fish-tank at night for heat, and are in a little run in the garden on grass during the day as long as it´s warm, which it is at the moment. They both seem to be doing fine.

 

[chooks4life]

Thanks for the update. Sorry to hear the gosling didn't make it, but good to hear the others are doing well.

Quote: True, in my experience. This likely has a lot to do with geese being monogamous in the wild for the most part. People have been throwing extra females in with mated pairs for a long time but domestic geese have been slow and reluctant to catch on, if what info I've read on geese breeding holds true.

There will always be a dominant female and both she and her mate will often make the subordinate female's life a misery. This is noted in many goose-keeping guidebooks I've read, but it was also borne out by my experience.

I found it sad to watch the mateless females tagging along behind the mated pairs, often getting abused for it. Once they did breed, since some males would mate with every female but only help one raise young, their eggs and goslings ended up being the property of the dominant female. It didn't matter if she brooded elsewhere, the goslings would abandon the mateless female to go become part of the family that had a father present. The abandoned mother would tag along behind them, looking pretty depressed. Bit of a 'half life'.

I would in future get every female her own mate. Many geese mate for life and have very strong, long lasting family ties, and they were genuinely not as happy to try to share a male. Developing breeds where the male mates with more females than he will tend the young from is not really a good solution, I reckon, since families where the father is present and helping out always do far better than families where its mother-only, no matter how great a mother she is. I have even found this holds true for chickens.

I think with your geese it's just a matter of finding what works, because no matter how great your setup is the animals themselves will always have different ideas. It's always trial and error. We're all learners, too.

Best wishes.

 

[livininbrazil]

Thanks for your insight. What you say makes sense. The geese I have are like cotton-patch or pilgrims, apparently not exactly either one, but they´re something along those lines, so I know that they´d prefer to be in a couple, which most of the time they are. They are extremely quiet-natured, and are in a flock of 2 ganders and 5 geese.
I bought a pair from a farmer nearby, and I thought they may be a bit of a remnant from an old cotton-patch flock for the cotton fields that were here some years ago,( he said he doesn´t remember their origins, he´s had these geese so long), so I went back and bought another female. The gander was so chuffed to see the second goose that I realised that obviously she was his original mate. The first goose became under-goose. So, last year the original pair and the gooseberry sat on eggs together, and it happened just as you said, gooseberry tagged along and the pair took care of the youngsters. I kept one male, and he´s mated off with the 3 batty sisters. I did get another gander, but sold him on again as he wasn´t the right type, and was a bit of a nuisance, I think he had some chinese in him, most of the geese around here are mixed with chinese, but I´m sure mine aren´t, I want to keep it like that, so that they´re basically "common" geese.
This year, top goose sat on eggs 2 weeks ahead of the gooseberry. Only one hatched, she stayed on the nest trying to hatch out stones, I kept taking them away but she refused to get off and look after the little one, leaving it up to the gander, who although he kept an eye on it, at times forgot it, and then he would get a real telling-off by the mom. I looked after it for a while as I thought it was not gettingenough food, then put it back with dad, but sadly it didn´t survive. I was very disappointed, it was the first gosling I´d lost, I even gave it a name. So, as goose didn´t want to leave the nest, I popped 3 eggs from the batty (3 sisters that do everything together) geese under her. Shortly after, gooseberry hatched hers out, duly left the nest, and waltzed around the place with the gander and goslings, but the gander kept taking them back to the first goose,who was actually lifting her wing for them, even though she was sitting, and the gooseberry would just tag along again....
Two weeks passed, then one gosling died one night, another the next night, I I´m sure they just didn´t have any goose sufficiently nurturing them. So, I took the third gosling to rear myself, didn´t want to risk losing any more, it´s now a month old, and the one gosling that hatched Friday under top goose (she´s not interested in it! Second time she´s not interested in one gosling) is together with it the whole time now, no real probs. Ok so far. Top goose is still on her empty nest, will put something there to make her get off. Meanwhile, gooseberry is laying again. I´ll let her sit on them, but I thought if I put up a temporary fence around her nest área, do you think she´ll have more success, or would I be better off rearing them myself? ( Sorry about the long story, but no-one here knows much about successfully rearing geese, mostly the goslings just die and people just say they´re delicate.) I learn mostly from the internet. I´ll be an expert with so many mis-haps! But I´m learning........