A New Game!!

Around May 11, my sweetheart decided to see what would happen if he went out to the property with some seed when the geese were feeding. He was cautious. Papa knows us, this being his ninth season with us, but we were concerned that the Goslings might come to equate all humans with seed. Still, we decided to try and really, by then, we’d been in lockdown for two months, so the timing was right.

Thus began an event that brightened our hearts; an event that after minimal protest, Papa grudgingly agreed to. Papa is quite sanguine about things when it comes to us. He even doesn’t mind the dog, but this was new behaviour from my sweetheart.

In the end, no harm done. Everyone gets a treat and our hearts lift.

Don’t get me wrong. This game was only possible because we have developed a relationship with the family over the past nine seasons. They trust us; they know us. They do not respond in the same way to the other humans who live on the property.

Over the next couple of months, every few days, my sweetheart would go out with seed and I would open the living room window so I could lean out for photos, or go out with him. It came to the point that I always knew when my sweetheart had rounded the laurel hedge.

And that’s how their third week passed. Sometimes, they were on their own.

Sometimes, with a visit from my sweetheart.

And so, May 18 dawned. Another beautiful sunny day in the Goslings’ lives. They’d been with us three weeks and as usual, we had utterly lost our hearts to them.

That day, as has happened regularly for years, several other Canada Geese flew in for a visit at the three week mark. Some years, they stayed for days, much to Papa’s distress. This year, it was a quick visit.

We’d settled into a Lockdown routine and our family had settled into its regular routine. We were all healthy and our little family of Canadians was thriving. Life was good.

And six months on, as I write this, we enter a new challenge with the pandemic, post-holiday upsurges and a new variant that transmits more easily. We’re all learning to live with it in our own ways, but please … stay safe, everyone.