Today we swapped our four female West of England geese for four females from a fellow smallholder in order to get new blood into our breeding programme. Guinevere, Sylvester and Slyvester 2 are of course all siblings so having unrelated females is now perfect and we feel we really are set up for next year. Our four were all this year's birds whereas three of the ones we swapped were born last year – the picture is hopefully showing off their best sides!!! The 4th is one from this year, almost exactly the same age as the one we swapped. But sadly, Sylvester and co weren’t fooled and treated her as an imposture, albeit very gently. For the moment, she will hopefully just stay with the older trio instead. She is massively tame and we are probably going to call her Gloria, as a tribute to the original Gloria who we lost a couple of months ago.
We ‘may’ consider selling Syvester 2 and one or two of the new girls as an unrelated pair/ trio but that partly depends on how everyone gets on and whether we think taking this many geese through the winter is sensible...
For now though we want them to settle in and start eating the oodles of grass we have – and to think that this time last year we were at the start of a massive heat wave and had to feed hay in July!!!