But I would like to spend more time with them. Do you have any advice on taming them, goose girl?
In my experience,
imprinting is key. The last two goslings I had were one month old when I got them, and they were not used to having people around, i.e. not imprinted on humans. It took days before they weren't scared of me, even though I spent many hours every day just sitting on the grass with them. Eventually they did start following me around, but they were always very cautious of sudden moves, I could never pet them, and they did
not like other people. When they grew up they attacked people they didn't know.
My first two goslings were almost the same age, about three weeks old when I got them, and they were imprinted on humans. They followed me as soon as I got them out of the box and cried if I left them. If they couldn't find me they'd go to my neighbors' porch to hang out with them instead.
Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian ethologist, found that geese imprint very soon after hatching. He found out by accident as he was watching a Greylag gosling hatch. It focused on him and talked to him, he answered back, and from that moment on he was the only parent the gosling would accept. Later he did more experiments, getting goslings to imprint on different objects like baby strollers and rubber boots. He found that imprinting was irreversible, and when the stroller-imprinted Greylags grew up and located themselves in a park, they'd constantly try to "free" passing strollers from the people pushing them. I would have loved to see that!
Obviously, you can't do anything about the imprinting now. What you can do is make sure your goslings never perceive you or other humans as threats, or get nervous or uncomfortable around you, because they may associate those feelings with you. While geese are not great thinkers, they do have excellent memory, and it takes them forever to overcome a bad experience. Which really makes sense for wild geese, although it's somewhat impractical for us when we try to make them trust us.
