A Grim End To The Tale

This is so sad! Remember the Canada Goose family that was the subject of the April 13 Photoblog Wednesday? They had a sort of fan club visiting but keeping a safe distance, leaving food for the geese and basically being the “Gosling Watch.”

Then this past Monday the goslings started to hatch, not even all of the eggs had hatched, but they started to. Some idiot, and I use the term idiot with every bit of vinegar, spite and blame it can conjure, thought it was a good idea to move the mother goose and goslings/eggs to the other side of the road. When the mother goose was approached and her babies threatened, she went nuts and in the frenzy ran in front of a car and was killed. What was something beautiful to the post office patrons was destroyed, murdered, by human ignorance.

You don’t ever touch a baby animal. The smell of a human on them can make a mother abandon it. If you approach a baby, a mother will react. In this instance, that reaction cost the mother goose her life and probably the lives of the babies. I haven’t heard that the father goose was involved at all, which means he probably wasn’t there at the time. That means he wasn’t able to be there to save any of the goslings. A young gosling must be warmed by a parent about every 15 minutes and these were newborn and still unhatched geese. Geese mate for life and are absolutely as attached as humans are. Scratch that, most humans can’t comprehend that kind of a bond in this day and age. The gander would have returned to find his family massacred.

In thinking about the goose’s reaction to a strange human with plans to move her, touch her hatching eggs, I completely understand the reaction. If I was holding my newborn baby and someone who didn’t speak my language said nothing but grabbed the baby, I’d go nuts too. That’s a natural reaction

As simple humans who have many generations ago abandoned the use of our instincts for conscious thinking, and usually under-thinking to the point of touching a nest when the eggs are in the middle of hatching, my only hope is that we learn. I hope that everyone who was touched by the potential simple miracle of nature’s new life in the spring, can learn from the sad feelings that range from disappointment to anger, and get a better understanding and respect for the animals that come to live in the city when we’ve grown our cities in so many of the places they live.

Life renewing itself in animals of any species is an everyday miracle, the art of life itself. Treat those miracles like art in a museum. Look, but don’t touch and when security tells you you’re too close, respect.