Right here I wish to make an explanation, that although we shot twenty-six, they were not all eaten by us shooters, but were given around to our nearest neighbors.
On February 20th, 1911, they started coming from the South again, and in less than three weeks there was a small cloud of them. Really I did not know there were so many Canada geese on earth.
As I have previously stated, my home is three miles north of Lake Erie, and these geese most always go to the lake for the night; and by times when the first bunch would be alighting in and around the ponds at my home, you could not see the south end of the string of them, coming.
Now I faced another problem: Where was the feed coming from? Very true, I have made a little park just west of my house and have graded out a pond one hundred and ten feet in diameter; yet this does not furnish them with feed. So I quit feeding them in what we now call the north pond, and just fed in the park, thinking the wilder ones would go on and that only the old acquaintances would come to the house. But that did not work out very satisfactorily; they were bound to make my home their home.
SPRING, 1911
The earth, the water and the heavens were literally alive with geese the fourth year. The photograph, of course, shows only part of the flock of geese. Drain tile and brick manufacturing plant is in the rear.
One morning we neighbors were shooting a few at the north pond. We shot into a family of five. I shouted “Don’t shoot, boys, they are too far off,” but the words were too late. The bangs of the guns were the only reply I heard, and two geese fell dead; one extremely large gander fell with a broken pinion; the other two flew away to the lake. At my request the boys gave me the big gander. I took him to the house and performed a surgical operation on him, myself. I first tied the severed arteries with strong linen thread, then cut the end of the wing right off and let him go in the park. In about an hour the other two geese came back, circling very high. By this time there were fully one thousand geese around the premises; all seemed to be honking to bring them down. Finally they circled over the park and this big, broken-pinioned fellow gave a honk, and instantly they answered and started to lower, making the air fairly hum as they descended. They lit near the house, with their wounded brother. To be brief, on May 2nd, the goose migrated with the big flock, but the big gander never left his broken-pinioned brother. Really it was one of the most self-sacrificing sights of my life to see this big gander give up all his liberties of this North American continent, and voluntarily live in captivity with his brother. We named them David and Jonathan.
DAVID AND JONATHAN
Dear old Jonathan! How he would get David to back clear across the pond, then run against the wind and try to fly! Yes I have seen this happen fully twenty times a day; Jonathan would fly across the pond, but when he saw his brother David was not coming he would alight and swim back to him. This sight took the desire to shoot out of most of my neighbors, and there has not been a goose shot on my premises since.