Pilgrim Geese

Smudge, our black lab knows the routine.  To the dam







             And back outside the kitchen.

The menagerie is growing, we now have geese. We got one pilgrim and three-crossbred female geese along with three gander goslings from up near Wynyard and then four young pilgrim ganders from Hobart.

Pilgrims are light geese, known for being quiet and docile. They are very hardy, are very good foragers, they make excellent natural parents and will frequently hatch and raise their own young. Their auto-sexing characteristic makes maintaining flock ratios easy and the excess birds make excellent eating. Pilgrim geese are critically rare, yet easy to care for and perfect for the small farm.

Our geese have settled in well.  They have access to a dam and good clover but just like the pigs, left alone they sit and wait outside the kitchen window. Every morning we walk them the hundred metres down to the dam and watch as they instantly pile in the water for a swim. Leave them alone and five minutes later they are heading single file back to the house and their chosen place outside the kitchen window.

I would like to source some more pilgrim females to breed a line of pilgrim geese but it might take a while to locate some good breeding stock. Many of the “pilgrim geese” available are not true pilgrims, there seems to be a common practice to label any goose with any gray feathers a pilgrim.