So yesterday I had to pull off the road and truck my eight year old son up a muddy incline so he could see the goslings. We talked about words like "signet" and "gosling" and then we started wondering why no one ever ate swans.
My life is so odd sometimes.
So, if you know why no one ever ate swans, I'd love to know. No fair googling. I didn't. Clearly. I suspect it is because we thought of them as nobler than geese. I wonder why the perceived nobility and rarity of a species does so much for its long term survival rate at the hands of humans?
LOL, well some of do find geese cute, and squee our little hearts out, but at least I can answer why these migratory birds don't migrate. But be prepared, it's sad.
ReplyDeleteTime once was that hunters would keep little flocks of geese with clipped wings so that migratory geese would land near them and the hunters could shoot them. (Why didn't they just eat from their flock? It's not like there was much of a hunting challenge the way they were doing it!)
At some point it became against the law to keep flocks of Canada geese for this purpose, so the hunters just let them loose. Of course, geese learn to migrate from their parents, and these geese were the offspring of generations of kept geese, so they didn't know how or where to migrate, so they didn't. And their offspring don't.
Interesting. I wonder if what is happening here is more that it's warm, they are well fed, and there are few predators so they just don't see the need to go to all that trouble, and after 100's of generations of lazy geese, they just hang out here.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know the hunting thing, though. I can't remember a time when anyone ate geese around here. My grandmother kept one for the eggs (not canadian, mind you). All I remember about him was he was mean.