That all sounds normalThis is my first breeding season with adult geese. I hatched out most of my geese last spring, so this is their first breeding season, too. I have 23 geese in all: Mostly toulouse and embden, but I have some embden-chinese, one african-embden gander, one embden-toulouse gander, one tufted Roman-seb gander, and 3 chinese-toulouse ganders. I do not know my female-male ratio, except for the 7 I know are ganders for sure. Everyone free ranges in the same acreage.
I thought I was doing pretty well by stealthily following the girls to see which ones were making nests where. I noted that the embden-chinese girl was using the nest under the apple tree, and the embden was in the burn pile. These were consistent, and I thought I could mark those eggs by their location. Until Friday, when I let them out and they went to their respective nests, followed by a toulouse, who was first stalking the embden-chinese girl, then 1/2 an hour later stalking the embden girl. Later I found the toulouse in the embden nest. So now I have no idea how many are using each nest and which ones they might be. I had thought that I could at least have an idea of who the mothers of the goslings were, but it looks like I'll just have a generalized, mixed-up mess.
On top of that, on my afternoon rounds today, I checked what I thought was my chocolate muscovy nest, only to find that one of my rouen girls has decided to go broody on it. So I'm not sure whether they are all rouen eggs, or if there are some muscovy eggs there, too. Whatever it is, I think there are more than 15 of them.
And I had a surprise baby goat on Wednesday, which was a full two months after the projected due date from my calculations of her first breeding date.
Nothing like a week like this to make me feel like an utter and complete farming noob! I swear, I do have some idea what I'm doing. Really, I do.
