At last a thought germinated that proved a success. I dug a canal forty feet wide and sixty feet long between two ponds. This canal was made at the mouth of the drain tile that supplies the ponds with spring water, the last water to freeze and the first to thaw out. A high gas-pipe frame was built to cover the whole canal, with a trap-door at each end. This was neatly covered with two-inch-mesh poultry netting, stretched good and tight to prevent it bagging and flapping in the wind. The trap-doors were left constantly up, and our domesticated geese were educated to winter under this, in the open water at the mouth of this drain tile. This contrivance is at the north ponds, where the geese remain quite wild.
MY FIRST SUCCESSFUL CATCH OF WILD GEESE
It was completed in December, 1921, and March, 1922, found me away from home on a lecturing tour. When I opened a letter from my boy saying, “Father, your goose-net is a success; we saw fully twenty-five follow ours under, this morning,” can you really blame me for reading it twice?
In a week or so I arrived home, and was greeted with these cheering words, “Father, there were dozens of geese feeding under the net last night. We are feeding shelled corn and wheat under there, and the wild geese go under without ours leading the way.” Early the next morning I was up and dressed, and quite excited, for I was up in the little “oblookatory” long before the geese arrived from the lake; but sure enough, when they came fully forty went under to feed. And they were just as good as caught, for my previous experiments have taught me how to make a trap-door that works to perfection. Just picture, if possible, the way I was stepping around! Here I had been seven years catching one hundred and nine geese, and no two bunches were caught alike; in other words, every catch was an experimental failure! But now I am going to catch them by the hundreds. Yet I must not pull the trap-doors while the big flock is here, to frighten them all.
On April 21st fully eighty per cent. of them had gone north. Sunday morning, April 22nd, only about three hundred were here, and it was now or never, for that spring.
I climbed up and watched them while Dr. Rob Sloan, of Leamington, who is one of my greatest helpers, stood below to pull the trip-wire. The opportunity arrived. I signalled the doctor, the trap-door dropped in the twinkling of an eye—and sixty-one missionaries were in captivity!
In catching the sixty-one we found a pair tagged in 1917; two others had had their legs broken but were healed straight.
Well, now the big flock is gone, and they know nothing of this disturbance, so now I will enlarge on this successful plan, I thought. So in the summer of 1922 I completed my big net having over 5,000 feet of area in it. One trap-door is one hundred and twenty feet long, one eighty feet, and another forty feet; all three are dropped by the one trip-wire.
Even if I had the time I could not give you a detailed explanation of how my goose-trap, trip, and trap-doors, and so forth, are arranged. But if you want to catch wild geese for tagging purposes (and I hope you do) come to my home the first fifteen days in July, when the pond is dry, and get my plans, which have proved to be a success; then you can go home and add to them.