Let me tell you the tale of the luckiest goose alive.
Several years back I purchased 4 African geese with the intention of starting a breeding program with them. I should have known better than to rely on my less-than-satisfactory feed dealer to get the right breed for me, because when the geese showed up 3 were clearly Chinese geese and 1 was a Toulouse. Worse than that- 2 of the 3 Chinese had angelwing by 2 weeks old and all 3 Chinese were males. So, plans for a breeding program were shot, and the geese had to be culled to stop the perpetuation of angelwing. Geese were renamed appropriately, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Stir-fry, but then there was the one female Toulouse, Frenchy.
Processing day rolls around and I had to deal with 4 geese. I don't know how many of you are familiar with processing waterfowl, but it is...a...lot...of...work. I'm talking hours spent on each bird. I had grossly underestimated how long it would take. I ended up processing the 2 most vicious birds Later on, I processed another, but got lazy because they are so time consuming, and I let Frenchy go on for another day. So, the only goose left was Frenchy. By this point she had paired up with one of my ducks and they formed an inseparable duo- Frenchy and Too. They were always together. Before long, I realized that if I processed Frenchy, Too was going to be devastated. So, I kept putting it off and putting it off. Eventually, I got more ducklings, and Frenchy just took over as their surrogate mother. She was still very much Too's best bud, but now Frenchy had a whole flock of her own to take charge of.
When Frenchy was about 4 years old, she was attacked in my front yard by a coyote. The coyote popped out of the bushes and tried to take one of her ducks. She faced off with the coyote as her ducks scattered, and drove it away. Not without terrible consequences, though. The coyote grabbed her by the wing and snapped it clean through both bones. As I ran out of the house, in response to her screams, she was running towards the house. She ran directly in my front door and hid in the closet. I knew as soon as I saw her that this was a situation that was beyond my expertise if we wanted her to survive. And, funny enough, we wanted her to survive. This bird was supposed to have been dinner, but I got lazy. She was 5 minutes away from a stew pot several years before, but had somehow endeared herself so much to us that we were willing to bring her to a very expensive avian vet to save her.
And that began Frenchy's several month long journey to recovery. She faced some pretty big obstacles. Here is a tale of her saga:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/...goose-sadly-frenchys-wing-comes-off-next-week
I never updated that story in the main post. I need to resolve that.
I will tell you guys how the tale ends, here, though. I never had her wing amputated because I simply couldn't afford it. After spending over a $1000 on a barnyard goose I couldn't justify spending any more money. I went around and around with the vet for quite a while. I eventually stopped dealing with him at all because I felt/and still feel like he failed me and Frenchy. I asked him to amputate the wing on day one, and he refused saying that he could fix it. Frenchy was in a sling for several months after we realized her wing would never heal. She hated the sling, though, and was constantly fighting it or fighting
with it. If you have never seen a bird battling with a piece of cloth wrapped around her...rolling around on the ground...sling tied into knots...chewed nearly through in several places...it is a sight to behold! I just gave up on the sling after a while. She was much happier after that, but the wing was hanging at an awful angle and was obviously still broken. I clipped all her flight feathers and that seemed to help not having all that weight pulling down on the wing. She was fine with it. In fact, she was more than fine with it. She seemed completely unaware that she had an unstable wing fracture. She would flap it around, go swimming with it, do all her normal things with it. She was completely oblivious to the fact that her wing was folding and flapping in a very disturbing way.
And Frenchy is still with us today. She doesn't free range as much anymore. She has gotten much more skittish and prefers to stay in the run with her pool instead of going to the ponds. She seems to have acquired an uncanny sense of when predators are around. She was always savvy, but now she is positively portentous, and likes to stay where she knows she is safe. Her wing is still unstable, but has formed a type of soft joint at the break. I am waiting for the day I will need to amputate it myself, and have 2 people waiting in the background to help when that time comes. I still trim the flight feathers down to nubs on that wing when they come in. She still yells my ear off every morning when I go out to let the flocks out of the house. She still fights me, beak and nail, every time I have to deal with her. She is still guarding her ducks and thinks she is queen of the flocks. And she and Too are still glued at the hip.
Thanks for reading, everyone.
got a prolapsed vent out of nowhere. We had to lickety-split get her to the vet...it was, of course, AFTER HOURS....and they quickly put stitches in her vent, and sent us home with...shudder...oral antibiotics for diarrhea. What followed were five agonizing days of orally giving a duck medicine! Cayuga, the next day, started to lay an egg- yes, while her vent was stitched- and we had to get her to the vet again! But guess what? She actually. Laid. The. Egg. 
