Ordering Goslings for Spring Arrival

Reader Contribution by Kirsten Lie-Nielsen and Days Ferry Organics
Published on January 4, 2016
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This is the time of year that everyone starts getting excited about new adventures in the spring. Winter is a time to cuddle up with seed catalogs, hatchery fliers, and notebooks with plans for your next steps in farming. If you are thinking about getting goslings in 2016, there are some decisions to consider before placing your order. The where, when, and how of your spring arrivals are all much simpler with a bit of forward planning.

Where will you get your goslings? Goslings are included in the poultry collection of a lot of major hatcheries, but there are also specific farms that focus on waterfowl. If you’re planning on breeding your geese, seeking out one of these hatcheries will help to ensure you get high quality birds. With geese especially, beginning with strong stock is vital to ensuring that the desired traits of the breed are passed on to the offspring, and good heritage also helps to boost fertility levels.

If you aren’t breeding your geese or meeting Standard of Perfection requirements isn’t important to you, the heritage of your geese won’t be as crucial. In addition to mail order birds, you can also find local feed stores that offer goslings in the spring, or you can locate a local farmer with some birds for you. In fact, finding someone with geese in your area that is hatching spring birds can be one of the best ways to get high quality geese and know exactly what stock they come from.

You can also think about if you’d prefer adult birds. Grown birds will be ready to lay, if you are hoping to get eggs from your geese, and they are hardier than new born chicks. However, you will eliminate the possibility of the geese imprinting on you, and you will get birds with per-determined personalities, which may be aggressive or very shy.

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