GOOSE BREEDING THREAD - for breeding, incubating, hatching and rearing.

[livininbrazil]

Sharing experiences and supporting each other during the ups & downs is what makes this forum great. The best advice I have ever received about hatching geese came from the guy who started this thread.... Pete55.... who, by the way, lives in England.

it´s great for me, I´m learning so much from some of you. I always had birds in aviaries in England, and although I knew folks that had poultry, including my gandfather, I never had the space to keep them. Here I have the space and am enjoying it totally! A bumpy learning curve at times, but I already know a lot more than the other folks on the farms round about here.
Oh, I had a peep at Pete55´s photos...reminds of where I grew up.

 

[servpolice]

Haha i would love to live in brazil tho! And dont think there are whitegreylags in ireland but i do breed a pair i can show u a pic and i know alot of geese but my weakest point in geese is diseases thats it and i know alot about incubation so in spring or when ever we can share info ! I just came on byc to ask one question i didnt know but i love it coz there is so much new info and i love sharing info and getting INFO!!! XD

 

[livininbrazil]

I´ve seen greylags in England with just a bit of white on their faces. From what I´ve read it would seem that the tendency for the "white" gene comes from Europe, where the breeds originated that carry the dilute or spot genes to make the white. I´ve only seen greylags with a touch of white, though I have seen a photo of a white one among a flock in flight, very nice.
But I don´t do any incubating, I leave it all to the birds!

 

[servpolice]

Same here ive 23 females and they all brood
and get goslings i just incubate africans and eggs that are still in the nest and is left by the mother and her babies and the greylag are the best brooders and mothers i have and they are the only geese i have that nest outside and not in shelter

 

[livininbrazil]

Same here ive 23 females and they all brood
and get goslings i just incubate africans and eggs that are still in the nest and is left by the mother and her babies and the greylag are the best brooders and mothers i have and they are the only geese i have that nest outside and not in shelter

Are your greylags just wild birds that have taken up residence, or are they bred in captivity and have leg-bands? Why do you breed them? Who wants them? As they´re pretty abundant in the wild, I´m curious.

 

[servpolice]

I breed the white greylags in captivity to sell mostly to nature reserve owners and to a zoo in warsaw(poland) and to the zoo in our capital coz regular people dont buy em becoz they are rare wnd expensive and i have the grey type greylags to breed them and release in the wild but im not allowed to sell them but they dont know that i sell them to people which i do and they are only tagged if they are males ,no idea why but thats the law here

 

[livininbrazil]

Well that´s really interesting. Have you done that only since being in Ireland, or did you do that in Holland too?

 

[Iain Utah]

I agree it is very interesting! I'd love to see pictures!

 

[servpolice]

Ill show ye pics when its not dark here and in holland i used to live in the posh part of amsterdam and had a tiny yard so i never had any animals but when i came to ireland i lived in a very posh town known for golf but anyway i worked at the golf course and there was a lake and one day i was cutting grass and saw a nest with all broken eggs of hatched goslings and one little greenish wet baby,i thought it was a duckling coz i didnt know anything about geese ! But anyway i didnt know what to do with it so i wanted to put it back but it was stormy so i brought it home and gave it water and newspaper in a shoebox and i didnt know what to do with it so i next day putted it back on the nest but then it start following me and i was thinking *** it followed me like a dog would! And so i thought it was so cool that it followed me and started talking to me so i kept it and eventually it grew so big i thought wow! What a big duck andthen it finally grew up and it turned out to be a greylag gander and i still thought it was a duck but anyway i had him and i thought i would want to get a mate! So i bought a bunch of cambell ducks and saw a big difference later on so i got three embden goslings and knew he was a gander and became mates with one of the embdems
And then i started liking geese thanks to that goslings coz before i never liked waterfowl ! And then i loved em and wanted more goslings so i bought pairs of geese all over ireland and england and then 2 years ago i bought 9 african geese browns and i was in love with them and then a man saw my geese and he owned a nature reserve and asked if he gave me 6 pairs of greylags i would pair up their goslings and put them in the wild and i did and i got the white greylags i traded for my french tolouse which i was happy with and i never knew they were so rare in ireland so i started breeding them.(they can be very hard to keep since they keep flying home when its feeding time sometimes they fly too high! But then i bought 21 acres and the geese love it espically the long river . Thats it and i buy new breeds yearly . OH! And i still have that greylag that was found in the nest 10 years ago ill show you a pick of him tomorrow and his mate is also still alive and they are my oldest pair of geese i have! :-D

 

[Iain Utah]

What a wonderful story!! Thank you for sharing!