Today my husband saw the two ganders fighting across the pond. Awhile later one was breeding the remaining female and her head was underwater for a long time until my dh was able to get out there with the golf cart and the gander gave it up. My dh was afraid the little hen was going to drown... a light went on... later he told me he thought he knew what had happened to the other hen.

We’ve had geese for years with a pond in the backyard in the past, and have never had any problem with them... we didn’t even realize when we ordered these last ones that two ganders were not a good plan; we thought from our observation that they each had their own mate. So as you can see we didn’t have any serious problems with our others.

Does anyone have any input to help me out? I am disheartened and very sick at heart about this.

that being said, yeah, it sounds like two males just isn't working for you.

i have one boy duck and a pair of male/female geese so thankfully haven't had this problem. as i get more, though, i would imagine i might. eeek.

i would get rid of these two, honestly, and start over. it doesn't sound like you would want to put any innocents out there with them.

i would think if the territory were too small to support them that you would have had problems before.

maybe get rid of these and start again. could you get one male and two females? or just one of each?

i don't want to be offensive, but to me, it reminds me of a rooster. i would probably eat them. but then i can eat something with a bad attitude, some people can't. or would't want to and taht's cool, too.

a big hug to you. this would totally freak me out, too.

I googled gander drowning goose, but couldn't come up with anything. It would seem mother nature would prevent this sort of thing, but since they're domesticated, perhaps it could happen....or, to add to your theory,,,is it possible that she was trounced twice in a row and was so spent she drowned as a result? Or could she have been injured or compromised in some way and THEN met up with your gander's advance? I can only tell you that in our case, our gander managed to have his way in about 20 seconds at best, with a lot of splashing around. I don't know if this sheds any light onto your last sighting of wreckless behavior, but that's OUR norm. I DO know that birds - all birds, are suspectible to and wither under stress.

We have a similar situation (2 perfect pairs) in both our Muscovy and Indian Runner department. Duck love is tough love too, and I occasionally see a single hen doing double duty, so I sometimes wonder if we have almost, a surplus of males. I'm keeping an eye on it.

Can you add more females? It helped us. This spring we too will be entertaining another gander. We've decided to keep one of the 'sons'. This will give us 4 females, two males. Hopefully, there will be enough love to go around.

Picklespickles, I think you might be right about starting over. It would be hard on me to do, but the thing is I am not sure if we could at this point. You mentioned getting another female or two. We’d love to but don’t know where we could find them and don’t know of anyone needing a couple of ganders... personally I could never eat the culprit (those who can, that’s great) and besides, he’d make a mighty expensive Christmas dinner!

lfrj, I don’t think she was compromised in any way as far as I know. Just that morning when my dh let them out they were all strong and vigorous. This happened a couple of hours later. During the day they have a large grassy area for ranging behind our house including a 2 acre pond. My kitchen window overlooks it so most of the time they’re in my sight. We put them in a secure enclosure every night and they are glad to go there. We have lots of coyotes around and some creature has tried to dig it’s way into the enclosure several times so I think it gives them security... also we had a small pen right next to them where we were trying to nurse a badly injured goose back to health (coyotes had gotten into our neighbor’s pen and killed all but her). This pen was sturdy and heavy but I went to let them out one morning and something had dug its way under her pen and killed her. I felt pretty sick. Must have done it for pleasure because only her neck was injured besides her former injuries. My geese had some less serious injuries as though they had been terrorized. The largest gander seemed to have a broken foot (the wire of the pen was bowed out on the side nest to the small pen and I think he must have kept hurling himself against it wanting to help while the other trauma was going on), three had missing toenails, all their beaks looked roughed up, etc. For days they didn’t even want to come out which was very unusual. But they soon were back to normal, altho the gander limped for quite awhile.

I wonder if your first theory could be right. Isn’t this a little out of season for mating behavior or can that happen anytime? Maybe she wasn’t receptive? Now I am worried about the other goose if the gander keeps up this behavior, which I see no reason why he won’t. There is a lot I don’t know about geese, I guess. I’d thought we were somewhat experienced.

One day my friend was in the house and heard loud squawking from the pond. She looked out the window just in time to see two wild canadian geese drowning her goose. My friend grabbed her bb gun and went to the goose's rescue.

She fired a couple shots at them and they took off. The goose was ok, but was very indignant. My friend kept her inside at night after that.

My friend said she also had problems with raccoons eating her eggs.

I have read about how rough ducks can be when they are breeding. Seems to be the case with other waterfowl as well.

Velvet ~:>