Our Spring Additionsfeatured

Petra drove to pick up our chicks and the geese rather than using the mail like last year. I remember a lot of consternation over on time delivery and whether our hens would be lost in the mail. That concern was understandable. There isn’t much space inside the box for the chicks to move around. You can only imagine the hell of being lost in the mail as a small chick, even if it isn’t very likely. Efficient and cost effective to drive 6 hours to pick up a modest amount of fowl? Nah! The drive offered only piece of mind.

We use is Cackle Hatchery in Lebanon, Missouri to purchase the fowl on our farm. Everyone that works there is incredibly friendly! Petra arrived to pick up two Toulouse geese and five Speckled Sussex hens. Although the bill was only $17, Cackle treated Petra just as well as farmers spending hundreds for their summer chicks.

Toulouse Goose = Loud

Petra and I are new to geese. It will take us a few months to figure our two Toulouse geese and tell our readers best practices and potential pitfalls. But both of us can testify to the volume of the goslings. The first time I noticed their volume was when Petra called me from the road coming back from Cackle Hatchery. Gosling chirping drowns out the chicks and was unavoidable while I was talking to Petra on the phone. She told me that the geese were never quiet for the entire 6 hour drive!

And the noise continued into the brooder. I work from home. The noise coming from their brooder completely drowns out the chicks and has become the soundtrack of my life. This is impressive, considering that their brooder is about 75 feet and four rooms away from my office! At night, their chirping comes through loud and clear while I try to sleep. I shut the door to drown out some of it, but complete silence when the geese are chirping is impossible. My home sounds like an aviary!

But Everyone is so damn adorable…

But you look at that face and you can’t help but love the little guys! They run around on their web feet on inexplicable route and at random times. They LOVE eating from my hand. We can also fill up a sink and allow them to play in the water. We are encouraging them to eat grit. Once the geese are in the habit of eating grit, we can move up to some tasty dried minnows!

Our Chick and Goose Brooders

We feed our geese a mix of water fowl crumble and an organic chick crumble. The water fowl crumble are like small pellets and they force the goslings to use their little teeth to chew. This is very new for them so we mix in the smaller chick crumble to ensure that some food gets into the gosling. As I stated earlier, we have some water fowl treats standing by for when the goslings are ready. They prefer a heat plate to a lamp. The goslings normally sleep inside the heat plate (like a little cave) and also use it as a place to hide when they are scared.

We set up our chicken brooder in the same fashion that we did last year. We chose a brooder that is made of plastic and has high walls. The brooder is available on Amazon. It is better than the metal water troughs that most people use because the walls are taller, the space for the chicks is much larger, and it’s configurable. The water trough is great for the first week or so with the chick, but quickly becomes too small as the chick grows. The tall sides also prevent “escapes”.

You will notice in the pictures that we line our brooders with paper towels. This is a training tools through the first couple of days. The chicks and goslings do not have a mother to train them on what to eat and what not to eat. We line the brooder with paper towels to prevent our fowl from chowing down on hemp bedding rather than the organic crumble that we feed them.

One last word on togetherness…

We planned on keeping our goslings and chicks in the same brooder. This seems good in theory, but is sloppy in practice! The goslings are FAR LARGER than their Speckled Sussex counterparts and get bigger every day. They also have teeth. The goslings wouldn’t intentionally hurt the chicks, but we separated them just to make sure none of the chicks were injured. We will be re-introducing them little by little over the never several weeks.

More stories to follow as we continue our adventures with this incredible animals!