Earlier this year, a friend contacted me about her goose. Her husband was considering killing the long-necked varmint, whom she had raised by hand from a baby. Could we give the baby a home? “He” was rough on birds twice his size, and demanded attention.
Of course we could. Ever since our first impulse-purchased geese almost 20 years ago, we have loved having a flock of geese around the house. Our last, largest, longest-lived flock was taken out by the combination of a stray dog and coyotes (which I fear have given us a family of coydogs, but that’s a column for another day.)
I’m not even sure I told Miss Rhonda I’d be bringing home a goose that afternoon. It may have slipped my mind, or I might have simply added a line to my usual “On the lane” warning text. Maybe something like “On the lane with a goose.” Thankfully, she did not meet me at the gate with a firearm, but instead set up a kennel for a gosling who was barely out of down.
From the moment I saw Markie, I knew she wasn’t a “he”, but simply a misunderstood “she.” Lone ganders are sometimes hard to get along with, but Markie was just desperate for love.
From the start, Markie has been sociable; geese are rarely solitary, and I figured we would pick up a few more goslings and get them all moved happily into the reconditioned chicken pen. The best laid plans of mice and men and all that came into play (namely work, funds, a lack of friends with spare geese, and my own physical limitations) so Markie ended up going from a kennel goose to a house goose.
One of the many justifiable complaints folks have about geese is their tendency to relieve themselves wherever and whenever they want, and such relief seems to be a hobby for most geese. In that regard they are worse than goats, based on our experience. It took a while, but Markie is actually about 85 percent housetrained – still less than the average pig, but much better than the average politician. Pigs are easy, by the way, and even the average politician housetrains better than the average goat, but that too is a column for another day.
As she grew, Markie had to start sleeping in a kennel again. She discovered the bedroom, and wanted to sleep with the dogs and cats who share it with us. The dogs do not understand her brand of affection, which involves gnawing cornrows up and down their backs.
I think she desperately wants to be an aesthetician. She’s rather fond of human toenails and callouses, to the point I was considering opening up a trendy nail salon where ladies could get their feet painfully exfoliated by a goose for the low, low price of $100 a session. People pay more than that to have tiny fish eat the dead skin off their feet. At least my goose is a conversationalist. You can’t have a conversation with an aquarium full of tiny fish. I just need to find the right internet fashionista to endorse the plan.
Our temperamental Catahoula dogs take issue with Markie’s brand of haircare and love, although Boudicca the pitbull just hangs her head, sighs and allows herself to have an avian makeover. Since Markie will happily sit up all night talking and grooming, she goes into her crate at night.
At dawn each day, she greets me as I let her out, and she waddles her way into the front yard for a drink and a morning bath, followed by the other things geese do with alarming frequency.
One recent morning, Markie disappeared.
I was rather concerned for a few minutes, because geese generally don’t shut up when they’re awake (and often not even in their sleep). I was about to start worrying when I saw movement behind the clothes washer.
Markie was acting strangely, and before I could reach her, she began honking in celebration and stood up.
Our girl had laid her first egg.
Since we have no male geese, there was no chance the egg had a baby gosling inside, so at the first opportunity, I plucked it from her nest and deposited it with the other eggs that are set aside for eating. Sure enough, the next morning, she was back, and we repeated the process, although she was rather suspicious of me rooting around in her nest. Now she greets me at sunrise, waddles out the door for business, comes in to tell me what mystery of life was revealed in her latest dreams as we share a cup of coffee, then excuses herself to her nest in the kitchen. There’s usually another egg before I have my third cup of coffee.
Having been raised around others of everything except her own kind has had a remarkable effect on Markie. I suppose some might say she is a bit confused.
She rarely shows the classical Cobrachicken tendency to attack anything that moves, although she won’t hesitate to corner a cat, and she takes pleasure in frightening the younger dogs.
We live a little over a thousand yards from a major road, and there’s a lot of traffic noise, along with the aforementioned coyotes, boomcars, lowflying aircraft and frequent loud parties a half-mile across the woods. Sudden loud noises cause our dogs to rush outside barking furiously. Nine out of ten times, Markie has to join in, rushing out with them, waving her wings and honking like a lopsided dinosaur. Heaven forbid someone actually come down our lane.
She likes to sit in laps and tell the owner of the lap about all the injustices she has experienced on a particular day, and demand action on said injustices. If she could speak English, she’d make a good lobbyist, except for the tendency to bite when she gets angry.
Markie has even been known to beg while Miss Rhonda is cooking supper. It isn’t that unusual to hear her roar from the kitchen, “Dogs! Cats! Goose! Get out of here!”
The bird watches television; she seems to prefer the news, especially weather reports and commentary programs. She even has a favorite meteorologist – I know she is favored because Markie will happily fluff her feathers and get closer when the young lady is on the screen.
Our goose has a few TV series that she seems to like, but she’s not a diehard fan of any particular program. It might be that she isn’t really watching TV as much as she is watching the colors and hearing the sounds, but I prefer to think she’s paying attention inside her quarter-tablespoon size brain.
Markie loves music. When we call folks to sing happy birthday, with the hounds singing along, Markie now joins in. She will stop and stare at the television if there’s a band performing or someone singing (a singer of whom she approves, of course). On Sundays when we can’t make it to church and watch services online, she waddles in honking furiously as soon as she hears the first song, and stares enraptured at the screen while the music is playing.
She likes the old hymns, is okay with some contemporary Christian music, but isn’t a big fan of Southern gospel. She often sings along with the hymns. The fact that she then sleeps through the sermon is not a reflection on the preacher so much as it is on her attention span and inability to read the Bible.
Eventually, I will find some goslings, and get the bird pen sufficiently secured that she can go outside and be a normal goose.
Until then, however, we’ll continue to enjoy a rather confused Cobrachicken who watches the news, goes to church, and may someday have a career in cosmetology.
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