Can a Goose Live Alone?
Geese and swans are very famous as far as choosing their mates are concerned. They are used by many as the symbol of long-term undying love. Geese are renowned for their ability to form strong pair bonds. This bonding is what most people refer to as mating for life.
It is more prevalent in wild geese. You can also see the same behavior if you carefully look at your domesticated geese. Due to this nature, a question always pops up: Can a Goose Live Alone? This article answers this question and a few others in the hope of offering new and experienced farmers insight into the mental state of geese.
What Happens if Goose Lost Its Mate?
With the idea of mating for life, it becomes important to look at the consequences of a goose losing its mate. If you only have two geese on the farm, one male and one female, they will have an extremely deep bond. The same happens to wild geese.
For domesticated geese, a goose that experiences the loss of its mate will look for another mate in the flock during the same mating season. This characteristic is only visible in a flock with more females than males.
If the flock is balanced, a goose that loses its mate may remain single, refusing to mate with another goose or gander till its death. In wild geese, if a mate is injured, the healthy goose will stay by it in its last moments until it passes on. It will then continue living with the rest of the flock in solitude.
Can a Goose Get Lonely and Depressed?
Geese are highly emotional and have been known to experience loneliness and sometimes depression. If geese lose their mates or their entire clutch of eggs, they are known to mourn for a while. They seclude themselves during this mourning period, refusing to mingle with the rest of the flock.
They take care not to spread their sorrow to the rest of the flock and thus mourn alone, or with their mate in the event of lost eggs. It is always good to keep an eye on your goose, especially after it has experienced a loss. There are some ways that you can tell if a loss has caused the goose to sink into depression.
The goose will lose its appetite, alienate itself from the flock, and become irritable and aggressive. Some geese go as far as plucking out their feathers.
How Long Can a Goose Live Alone?
There is only one scenario where a goose can survive alone and remain healthy; this is where the goose grows up in solitude from birth. If the goose has not experienced the company of other geese from birth, it can live a long healthy life alone. It will, however, imprint itself on another animal or bird and seek company from that animal.
If a goose has experienced the company of other geese, subjecting it to solitude later is usually detrimental to its health. The severity of this is present in the Canada Goose. Some geese of this breed stopped their egg laying after being subjected to living alone.
In solitude, geese cannot survive for more than a decade. They also produce poor-quality meat and eggs and have less glossy feathers.
Can You Keep a Single Goose with Chickens?
Geese are not like ducks. Keeping a solitary duck with chickens is a practice that some poultry farmers adopt to add some security to the flock. It does not achieve the same level of success where geese are involved. Keeping a single goose with your chickens’ works on very few occasions.
Success is only seen in cases where the gosling is raised with the chicks from the day they all hatched. Introducing a solitary goose to a flock of chickens affects the health of the goose negatively. This is because geese need other geese to be happy and fulfilled. When added to a flock of nothing but chickens, the goose is bound to experience loneliness.
This shortens their lifespan and decreases their egg production. It is thus not encouraged to keep a single goose with chickens. Other than this affecting them emotionally, several diseases are not lethal to chickens but geese. Diseases like Botulism and Fowl Cholera that Chickens have built resistance to from years of selective breeding will kill your goose in a matter of days.
Do Geese Always Stay in Pairs?
Geese love the company of other geese. It is thus not strange to see them in pairs, doing everything together. Wild geese will live in a flock, but each goose will have a partner, forming a pair. A goose and its partner will spend most of their time together, often migrating together and never leaving each other behind if one gets injured.
On the other hand, domesticated geese operate more on a flock mentality. This, however, does not eliminate their need to be in pairs. Even in the flock, geese always pair up and spend a good amount of their time together. Since the ratio of male to female geese is typically 1:5, geese pair up based on friendship or birth.
They will maintain these pairs throughout their lives even after they produce goslings. If you observe keenly, you will see the pairs of your geese. For this reason, farmers are usually encouraged to maintain an even number of birds within their flock. Always remember that two’s company, but three’s a crowd.
Conclusion
Geese are gentle, beautiful creatures that are emotional, monogamous, and mate for life. Their nature makes it difficult for them to reach their full potential when kept alone. It is also hard for them to move on if they lose their mate. Domesticated geese may not show these traits to the extreme, but the basics of the characteristics remain.
It is thus advisable to keep your geese in a flock and regularly add younger geese in intervals to allow for bonding so that the flock does not fall apart when you remove some of the geese or ganders for meat later on,