Trego's Mountain Ear

For eight years, I’ve watched Gander train his offspring for the Fall migration.  He isn’t quite domestic, but he uses the floating dock to train the goslings to jump into the water before they can fly.  I mow a walking trail around the ponds and channels, and he organizes goslings to follow him flapping their wings – I think this qualifies as ground school for lesser Canadian geese.

It’s July 3, and he has a new use for my lawn – mowed and relatively smooth, it is apparently well suited for short flights – eight or ten feet – that get off the ground and then land again.  Flight school has started.  This year he has about ten goslings of his own, and as the younger adults start bringing their hatches in with his, he will be leading a fairly large flight.

From this beginning flight, in a couple of weeks, they’ll be learning to fly in formation to Rattlebone lake, then longer trips in the neighborhood, and then, in the Fall, the large flock descending on the small pond so everyone knows where home is next Spring.  It has been a good year for geese – the bald eagle has taken several, but not so many as last year.

The little Mallards have been hatching.  They spend most of their time in the shallows, hidden by Reed canarygrass.  They’ll replace the Canada geese for viewing in the last half of Summer.

Fawns continue to bed down in the tall grass of the hayfield.  It’s wet enough from the Spring rains that they’ll have another 2 or 3 weeks growth on them by the time I start mowing hay.