Henry the Horrible.

Henry.

He's awfully pretty. Blue eyes and bright orange beak and feet, pristine white feathers, soft and clean, inviting- almost. Henry is at his best in August. Especially this August, August is not breeding season and this year  Henry is alone. He is a Pilgrim Gander. The Pilgrim breed are special in that they are color sex linked. This means that the boys are one color ( white) and the girls are another (soft brown and white). So, as little baby goslings, it is simple to choose one boy and one girl. This is not normally so in the world of poultry. As youngsters most poultry look the same by breed, with no difference between the sexes, and because the sex organs are inside the vent area, you can't really see the difference, even if you look in the nether region. There are a few talented people in this world who can, with reasonable accuracy, evulse the vent and tell the difference. I don't know any of them, and in fact, there are some bird breeds that the only way to tell is to wait to see who lays an egg. That, or anesthetize and laproscopically have a peek at the parts in the abdomen. For this reason, Pilgrim geese are special. Several years ago, when Georgia decided she wanted to show geese, we easily settled on the Pilgrim as our breed of choice. We already had a mixed Toulouse-Embden gander, offspring of my mother's geese. His name was Rosebud. Yes, His. But that wasn't his only identity crisis. Rosebud was hatched by a duck. You see, his own mother, a goose, had abandoned the egg (perhaps because she had the good sense) but a misfit duck had adopted the large egg, faithfully sitting on it, until to my mother's surprise- and father's chagrin being not a big goose fan- it hatched. The duck was a Pekin, the common white variety of duck. She was unmercifully picked on by the other geese, and had escaped while sitting on the egg, but now that her little gosling had hatched, she was being picked on again. Her little boy was swiftly bigger than her, but they were a bonded pair, inseparable. I decided to take the odd couple to Cowfeathers. We called the duck "Clover".  Rosebud was always kind to his mom, and Clover spent the rest of her years hanging out with the geese. All the geese accepted her as part of the gaggle. Now, Rosie was not always kind to all, and the first spring of his gander-hood, he was a terror, both to human, duck and chook. He killed at least two chickens, and I spent several afternoons with a duck tucked between my thighs sewing their skin back over their skulls. The next year, in our blithe ignorance of goosely ways (despite the facts that we not only had a raging Rosebud,  I was raised with geese and much of the "It'll be funny one day" lore of my family featured geese) middle kid's desire to show geese put us in the market for cute little, fuzzy goslings. Pilgrims, a boy and a girl. She proudly named them Henry and Henrietta. Doted on them, cuddled and kissed and loved on the buggers. They grew. Henrietta was lovely, and sweet and social. She would come when you called her- albeit closely followed by Henry and Rosie and Clover. Henrietta wanted badly to see her people and  if you left a door open, which we often do on the farm, you payed for it in cleaning up goose poop. When they were a year old, middle kid showed them at the fair, winning the fancy geese category, as well as Water Fowl Showmanship (really). But it was Henry who started making his presence known on the farm. It wasn't long before we could tell that Raging Rosebud was a kitten compared to Henry. Henry feared no one and nothing. He would go after the dog, humans, horses, sheep, and cars. Woe be it to the duck or chicken who crossed his path. The kids had sticks and shovels lined up by the back door, so as to never leave the house without a weapon. I mainly relied on swift hands, but miscalculated once or twice earning some nasty bruises. The bugger even jumped at my face one day, missing by a good foot and painfully finding my left boob. Nothing like a 12 pound goose hanging off your boob, beating you with his wings. Thank you God for not posting that one on youtube.

We lost Henrietta in  June 2009. She had been sitting on a clutch of eggs for some time, and hatching was nigh. I was of mixed feelings. I didn't really want any more geese, but stealing her eggs made her fretful. While the kids and I were out of town, poor Huz left to watch the farm, a marauding critter pulled her right off her nest, through a hole in the wall of the barn ( darn horses always chewing!) and left her remains in the pasture. The nice goose, gone. "Dash", as my eldest would say.

That left us with two ganders. The odd couple redux. I believe this spring, a goose-less one, made the ganders a bit kinder, more gentle. They only killed one duck. At my mother's farm, her gander - a infinitely more tolerable version of ours- had been killed by a fox while defending his ladyfriend. Wing and Wing was ganderless, and Cowfeathers was ganderfull. A quick switcheroo in Pennsylvania returned Rosebud to his birthplace, where he seamlessly became head honcho. And Henry? He's alone. He's so lonely, he's begun to defend the ducks from the roosters. He's so lonely, he flies over his fence (erected to save human limbs and purposeful vegetation) to hang out by my minivan. And poop. And, I feel bad enough that he's lonely to not complain so much about the poop on the patio. But, not so bad that I'm ready, yet, to get him friends.

Henrietta the prize-winning goose.