I first saw goslings back on April 30, and while these are babes from a different family, I have to believe they were born within a week on either side of that date. Back in early May, there were two goose families at the Nature Center, one with four goslings, the other with three. We then saw that one of the families had seven goslings and assumed that the stronger pair of parents had "adopted" the others. We naturalists discussed the possibility that geese parents can't identify individual goslings and so will take any they run into as their own. In today's picture, you can only see five babies, but the two adults nearby had 13 total goslings in this spot! So it's clear that parents accumulate goslings and now I wonder if it's the weakest set of parents or the strongest set (relative to others nearby) that is adopting so many children. The strongest set may think they are the best at raising young and so take all the goslings they encounter. Or is it that these babes were given to the weakest parents around, leaving stronger geese to go and produce more eggs and more goslings with their genes? I just spent a few minutes researching "gang broods" on the google, but I feel that only an actual book about geese and gosling agglomerations would give some solid facts. I'll leave that for later and for now say that goslings grow extremely fast, even with 12 brothers and sisters.
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