wow! I've never heard of a gander doing that before. Ive ordered from them several time and sometimes they will good up and not own up to it. I once ordered 6 golden Phoenix bantams 1 male and 5 females. They gave me 6 females and one was a silver not a golden and one wasn't even a bantam. When I told them they basically said they didn't care. They also gave me silver laced bantams when I ordered the standard.
They are precious, Congrats! are you going to try and let the adults adopt their older babies?
Here we have Gerald and Geraldine with the 2 goslings they hatched themselves, 2 days ago. This is their 1st venture in to the big bad world with all the other animals and birds.
Gerald is very gentle with them, but not with any other animal or human that comes near.
We have hatched 5 of their eggs in the incubator and they are all doing well too, but they are much older than these 2 little sweeties.
Any thoughts? They seem totally normal now and I have some ducks that were in with them (muscovies so they are a bit behind) and those are doing ok too although they aren't out yet. Aside from watching weight loss I am also no longer accepting eggs from poor husbandry ... Thanks for reading!Is the first gosling a dewlap?Hey Pete & everyone, Your hatching guide has been invaluable to me in my goose incubation. I have had excellent results until I tried eggs from another farm recently. I had been getting very nearly a 100% hatch rate in a homemade incubator with my own eggs, pilgrim x tolouse type geese (not sure how purebred), with only one egg quitting at day 14 out of 11 eggs. The other 10 are all happy healthy geese. My last batch I tried some geese from another farm as he had unrelated birds and breeds I don't have. The eggs themselves were not in the best conditions before they got to me (very dirty mud caked, pooped on), but I gave them a shot, cleaned them up and using the exact same settings and equipment I got four of them to day 25. When it came time for internal pip, 3 of them did it perfectly and one looked like this:Obviously not good. Turns out she was backwards and was kicking the membrane with her feet, effectively tearing it which was why there was blood. I tried to help her but long story short she didn't survive. When I took her out of the shell after she died, I noticed two things: she was HUGE, and she had swelling around her head and neck. I assume that the humidity that had worked so well before must have been too high for this batch. My mistake which I have learned from is even if it worked before, always weigh your eggs every batch. I had some ducks in the same run and weighing them they lost 12% weight when they should have lost 14% so I assume the geese were similar. Moving on to my question, the other three babies who are all dry and in the brooder now, seem to have some puffiness around their heads. Now, they are brown chinese and I have never hatched them before. I'm wondering is this some kind of edema or other problem, and is there any way to fix it? Or is it the start of a dewlap type thing (maybe they have an african uncle lol?). They are 100% normal otherwise, two have had their first egg poops already and they are noisy, want me, and are moving about like I would expect for 10 hour old geese. Here are their pictures:
The first baby shows what I mean the clearest.The others aren't too bad. All three of these are different birds, although they look similar
