Jaci Dawn

I have a couple serious posts to put up, but today I thought I’d post something on the fun side of life. Well, maybe it wasn’t fun for the one goose, but I had fun taking the pictures.

Normally the geese are rather boring. They goose-step, poop, sidle away, stop traffic and so on, but for taking photos: they’re boring. Except for his (her?) ID tags, old XW46 is boring. XW46 has been around for a couple winters now.

Just geese hanging out at the local pond. Doing a little “posturing” for dominance.

Maybe even bragging about themselves to the other geese.

Swimming off to be alone, together.

The goose equivalent of a quick shower.

Making sure everyone knows just how big and tough you are, especially those pesky mallards.

And then taking off from the water…

Right into the side of that rival goose on the other side of the pond!

Look at that other goose get out of the way.

An idyllic backdrop to goose violence.

Must be mating season. The geese are getting cranky.

We left the geese there and returned to the office where we were greeted by…

A rainbow!

And I can’t help but look at a rainbow and feel the promise. And that is a good lead-in to tomorrow’s blog post.

ttfn!

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This guy showed up along the business parkway where I work. He (she?) was quite uncooperative about letting me get a good photo of the letters (XW46).

I had a heck of a time finding any information on the goose collar and i learned a lot about the Canada goose along the way.

It’s mind-boggling to me. I thought there were just Canada geese. Then I learned there are dusky Canada geese.  I finally saw them last winter, but they’ve not been back that I know of and I never had my camera handy.

Apparently, we also have cackling geese. They are shorter birds with a lighter neck base and a shorter neck.

If you read the articles (or at least look at the photos on the links), you’ll see the subspecies break down even further. I am beginning to think I need to take a whole lot of photos of the geese around the business park and see how many cackling geese vs. western Canada geese we have. And maybe some of those are light-phase Dusky Canada geese.

It makes my head hurt.

I learned about the collars, too: they are color coded for the subspecies. Dusky Canada geese get a red collar, cackling geese get a yellow collar with only 3 digits (shorter necks), Lesser Canada geese get a blue collar and western Canada geese get a white collar with four digits.

Guess I know what the neck collar on my goose means.

It is a western Canada goose.

The collar looks ungainly, but the goose doesn’t seem to notice it. I was hoping I could find a place where I could report my goose collar sighting and thus learn some of the history of the bird, but I haven’t located anything yet.

I remember finding a dead deer with a radio collar up in the woods. Don & I removed the collar (the deer was a skeleton, mostly) and sent it back to the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife. In turn, they sent me a summary of the deer’s entire life according to her radio collar. I was fascinated to learn she never traveled more than a mile in her entire lifetime!

So I was hoping to find something like that about the goose. Even though I haven’t been able to punch in its numbers and get a story, I don’t count it a loss. I just learned so much about Canada geese that I never knew!

Who would’a thunk it?

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