Poor, poor geese

It's not often that I think about geese and they're not the most interesting of birds, but right now, I feel very sorry for the Canada geese in the park near my flat.

It's like this...A couple of weeks ago, I met the owner of Rocky, the French bulldog, out walking the dog in the very early morning. She mentioned that the geese in the park only seemed to have one gosling per pair, and I wondered if the pandemic had something to do with that. How, I don't know.

A week later, I was again on an early morning walk, this time through the park, and I got chatting to another dog owner (a big grey poodle this time) and I mentioned the paucity of goslings this year. "Ah," she said. "I can tell you why that is. An ornithologist told me that people had complained about the overwhelming number of geese in the park. So people went round all the Canada geese nests they could find and took out all the eggs bar one."

I find that pretty horrific. Yes, there were huge flocks of geese on the large grassy areas of the park, but if they can't find enough to eat, they'll go elsewhere.

Now, however, I see large groups of geese, tugging away at the grass, and barely a gosling in sight. 

On a walk in the park one Saturday afternoon, I heard a strange noise coming from a goose. As I passed the goose, I could see it was one of a pair and it had two goslings. (They couldn't find all the nests, apparently.) One gosling was fine; the other lay, incapacitated, on its back on the grass, its little chest still going up and down a bit. It was dying. And as the parent goose made its plaintive cry, all the other geese around the area were standing erect and very attentive. The moorhens, swans and ducks just went about their normal business, but not the geese.

This is why birds lay so many eggs. Their strategy is the same as that of Victorian parents: have 20 children and hope that two or three will live to see adulthood.

The breeding pair of swans in the park hatched seven cygnets this year and the last time I looked, they were down to five. "Water sickness" was the diagnosis of one woman (dogless!) whom I chatted with one evening. 

This, therefore, is why I feel so sorry for the poor, poor geese. Nearly all of the pairs have ended up with no gosling at all. It's breaking my heart to see them bereft of a little one to fuss over.