2007/04/19

current gen, next gen, future gen

There may be three generations of geese this spring. Two months back I posted a short movie of the first generation of the progeny of Pate and Foie. Today I have six 1-week olds learning the ropes in the kitchen. Here are three of them jockeying for position for the warmth of my neck (see below regarding pooping -- yes the little darlings pooped on me while getting this picture):



The first generation you've seen already are well on their way to become food. But one has a condition called "angel wing", where the flight feathers stick straight out from the body. It can be corrected if caught early, but for meat birds it doesn't really matter. Still, it doesn't stop me from trying to fix it. Some say you can repair it by wrapping the wings close to the body. I tried this, and had partial success -- one wing is now close to the body. The other is requiring more work. Today I wrapped it with thin cardboard. S/he complained a lot, and I don't blame him/her. On the other hand... this is food.


In other news, Sally Muscovy has gotten the itch and wants babies, again (still?). How can one tell? She sits on eggs of course. The natural progression is that the birds lay a bunch of eggs (number depends on species), then stops laying and starts sitting. It appears that Sally gets the itch to sit about three times a year, starting in spring. Chicken eggs you get in the store come from birds that have had the sitting urge bred out; they lay and lay and lay, never sitting. That's how they get 300+ eggs per year from them. The normal cycle is to get a "clutch" of eggs, basically enough to sit on, then stop laying and start sitting (or "setting" as it is also written). Birds that sit on eggs is bad for production. And so the best layers are the worst sitters. Fortunately there are breeds that haven't had this urge removed from their gene pool. Muscovy ducks are one of them. Most goose breeds are also good sitters.


So what happens when you put two sitting breeds in one coop? They fight over sitting duty! Here we have Foie sitting on the nest, with Sally desperately trying to claim some eggs for her own.




Sally will have her day, but not with the goose eggs, they belong to Foie.

No comments: