Feeding & Nutrition

We got the goose because the man at the poultry auction said she would guard the place. Guard geese are a real thing, he told me, cheaper than a dog and meaner than a cat. I was skeptical. Then I met Geraldine.

She was a white Chinese goose, loud as a car alarm, and from the first morning she decided the bird feeder by the back step was hers. Not the seed in it. The whole idea of it. Any sparrow that landed got chased in a straight line across the lawn until it was a dot in the sky. The robins learned to feed at dawn, before she woke. The pigeons gave up entirely and moved to the neighbor's roof, where a quieter goose did not live.

The problem was what she did after the chase. She ate. Not a little. She planted herself at the feeder, tipped the tray with her orange foot, and cleaned it out before the kettle had boiled. I had put that feeder up for the small birds, the tits and the finches, and within a week Geraldine had claimed it as a personal buffet. A goose will eat a shocking amount once it learns a tray refills. I looked it up later. An adult goose can put away close to half a kilo of feed a day if you let it, and she was absolutely letting herself, with the single minded focus of a creature who has decided the world owes her corn.

So I bought a second sack. The first was mixed seed for the songbirds. The second was cracked corn and layered pellets, the proper goose feed the auction man had scribbled on a bit of paper with a pencil stub. Geraldine ignored the pellets at first. She wanted the corn, the fatty easy stuff, and she wanted it now. I learned to mix it, corn on top to bring her in, pellets underneath so she ate both without noticing the trick. It is not the most honest thing I have done, but a goose does not read labels and she was not about to start.

People think geese live on grass. They do, in summer, if the pasture is good. Ours was not. We rented a small plot with thin grass and a fence she respected only when she felt like it, which was rarely and never on Tuesdays. So feed carried her through the lean months, and the second sack became a line in the weekly shop I had not planned for. Feed is not free, and a guard goose guards best when she is not hungry enough to eat the thing she is supposed to be guarding. A hungry goose, I learned, guards nothing but the food bowl.

There was a night she earned her keep. A fox came down the path, and Geraldine did exactly what the auction man promised. She did not hide. She marched at it, wings half spread, the noise waking the whole house, and the fox took the long way around and did not come back. After that I stopped complaining about the second sack. She was, in her loud awful way, doing the job I had bought her for, and the cost of the corn suddenly looked like a bargain next to the alternative.

The small birds came back once I moved their feeder to the far hedge, out of her patrol route. They got the seed. She got the corn and pellets. Everyone ate, which is the whole point of keeping animals. You feed them properly and they give you something back, even if what Geraldine gave was mostly shouting at the postman, who now crosses the lawn in a wide arc and waves from a distance, which she accepts as tribute.

I never said her name to her face. Geese do not care about names. They care about the tray being full and the path being clear. I kept both true, and she kept the fox off the step. The second sack was the price, and it was fair. By spring the grass came in and she ate less from the bag and more from the ground, the way a goose should. The second sack lasted longer, but I still bought it, because a hungry goose is a goose with ideas, and her ideas involved my lettuce, my shoes, and once, memorably, the washing she tried to claim as her own.

One more thing about goose feed, since I wish someone had told me before the first sack ran out. Do not give them bread. People throw bread and think they are being kind, but it fills a goose with nothing and fouls the water until it goes green and sour. Corn, proper pellets, good pasture, that is the diet. Geraldine would have eaten the bread too, then looked at me like I had shortchanged her. She had standards, that bird, even if the standards were mostly about volume and the speed at which it arrived.

I worked out, halfway through the first winter, that the cost of the second sack was about the price of a coffee a day, and that felt different once I put it in those terms. A coffee a day for a fence that honks. The neighbor, who lost three hens to a fox the year before, stopped laughing at the goose and started asking where to get one. I told him the auction, the pencil stub, and the part about the second sack, because the sack is the part nobody mentions until the bird has eaten them out of house and home.

I still put the songbird feeder out. I still buy the second sack. The arrangement has held for two years now, and the only real change is that I no longer flinch when she honks. That is just Geraldine, doing her job, waiting for the corn. The birds get their seed, the fox gets nowhere, and I get a story I tell everyone who mentions getting a dog for security, which is that the dog will cost more and guard less and never once clear the pigeons off the roof.