Poor Kitty

She just can't help herself.
And she makes the swallows so mad~

tail feather envy

The boys and I spent an hour or so at the bookstore in Edmonton Tuesday night while Chris was doing his trucking course.
This funky looking like guy is a puppet that was in the children's section of the store. I have to tell you I'm in love with peacock feathers.
I may have to do some research and find out how hard it would be to keep a peacock around just so I could collect all the molted feathers.
I know that's kind of a stupid reason to want an animal, but I'm in love with the beauty and the rich shiny colors in those feathers. I know a ton of people use them in crafts. I'll bet I could make some cash off them at a farms market taking the feathers to sell -the ones that I'm not hoarding for myself that is. - and that's a whole nother question...do you have to treat bird feathers in some sort of solution to make sure they're not carrying mites or ticks or anything before you'd want to bring them into the house?
*sigh*
more things to research I guess

A Wild Goose Chase

A few weeks ago I mentioned my "evil Friend" the goose who had laid eggs on our hay bale?
And how I was unsure what the fate of those eggs had been?
well...

Looky what was in the dug out
Hiding- or trying to.

I have to tell you these babies still aren't as fluffy and cute as baby chickens. But I was still in awe of the discovery.

Our dugout is in the middle of our field and the deep slopes on the 2 sides make it impossible to see from the house. Since it's quite a distance from the original hay bale I didn't think they would have gone there. And when I stopped seeing the geese at the little pond out front I figured even Mama and Daddy were gone.

But Sunday driving down the highway ( the dugout is more visible from the road) I spotted Mama and Daddy and a suspicious amount of yellow fluff surrounding them. That evening I took the whole family and my camera with the zoom lens attached to go investigate.

The parents took off into the field as soon as we arrived, probably trying to lure us away from the babies. The little ones slide down the banks and swam as far away from us as they could get.

Then one of them started entertaining us by swimming closer and repeatedly diving under the water. When we looked up for the others a few minutes later they had disappeared.

This started the Goose Chase in the field.

We would briefly see the grass moving around one of the adult geese. Then one of the big ones would go in one direction the other in the opposite direction and the babies would be headed in a third direction usually for some place with the most ground cover. Like the trees.
Mom and Dad would be honking the entire time. Probably telling them where to head?
Once they were in the field and trees they was impossible to get close enough to snap another picture of the babies.
Clever creatures were doing and excellent job of evading us and distracting us to the direction of travel.
I was rather amused. They are obviously not geese that have spent any time in the city being hand fed. We even took some dried up bread crumbs with us- but couldn't get close enough to even try to tempt them with it. - that was a new experience for me. I'm used to geese in the city parks that are so bold they'll nearly bite your hand trying to be the first one in line for bread.

My Evil Friend

Can you see what's made it self at home on my hay bale?

How about now?

For the first little while I couldn't figure out if it was injured and dying up there.

At one point I took the dogs into the field and tried to get Jasper to put the run on her.

( In case you haven't guessed I'm not a fan of geese, In fact I have pictures of Nathan and Daddy feeding geese in Lethbridge and went through the entire album when I uploaded them to Facebook and tagged each one Evil goose 1, Evil goose 2 etc.- so there was no way I was going to investigate on my own)

But Jasper couldn't get her off that hay bale. She stood up spread out both her wings to make herself as big as possible and hissed. He decided this was not something he wanted to tangle with and took off into the other pasture.

This incident combined with the fact she's been there for nearly a month now. made me think the stupid thing has probably made a nest on there.

None of this would be a real issue but I would have liked to pull apart that hay bale and use it in the chicken coop. and her there hissing has caused that plan to go out the window.

But 2 days ago she finally disappeared. I immediately sent Chris over to investigate the bale (still not going anywhere near it in case she came back meaner than ever.)

He reported that there had indeed been eggs.

They were all broken in rather large pieces, and there are small chick like feathers scattered around.

So I'm not sure if she hatched them, or if they fell prey to something. (although Chris said there wasn't any gore to make him think that something happened)

Now I've seen a goose hanging around our front dugout. I'm wondering if she's moved the chicks to the water finally (would the weeds around the pond not have been a better place for a nest in the first place?) I just have to work up the nerve to get close enough to sneak up for a look.