wildlife

Geese stories – swan attacks

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I’ve been hampered by a foot problem so I don’t know what exactly happened when, but about a week ago, I discovered that one goose was missing from a flock of six. The remaining five were depressed and possibly shocked.

What happened?

A day or so later, after I saw what looked like one of the two lead geese trying to drown the other, I started to believe that that’s what happened. I was quite disillusioned. This wasn’t the vibe that I had been getting from them. How could I have been so wrong?

Today, five geese stood tall on the bank, watching me approach from the other side of the water. They seemed to be waiting for me.

Geese Nr. 6 was in the water there. Thin, tired, covered in mud.

The other five geese and particularly the lead goose made clear that they wanted me to look after goose Nr. 6 right now. Not after them.

Goose Nr. 6 already had a bum leg and some grey patches.

I was still at a loss as to what had happened when two swans showed up and one of them suddenly attacked. I was able to tell it off. They have no little ones and were being terrible bullies. I don’t like that. I told them that. They need to go back to their side of the bridge.

The other five geese were clearly trying to lure the swans away from Goose Nr. 6. Lead goose Nr. 2 is currently limping – and hissing a lot, not surprisingly.

I called a friend and also searched the web for what best to feed. I ended up with corn, peas and chicken cheese cat food. The goose liked the cat food.

I’d already given escarole and bread. I hate giving bread but in this case, maybe it wasn’t so bad because the bird needed calories. (Unfortunately, they tend to go for bread.)

I’ll stop by from time to time and I’ll do what I can. It can’t get out of the water; I don’t know why.

Of course, bird flu crossed my mind too, but I didn’t think I was seeing the results of bird flu. When the swan suddenly attacked and the goose went into a panic, everything became clear.

These geese really see me as their friend, possibly because of the story below.

I’d always counted to see if they were all there, but after the incident 👇🏻, I counted out loud, to let them know.

(Humans are the stupid ones. That’s what I have learned from birds. If you work with animals instead of against them, you can achieve a lot more. Non-human animals are “people”. Many birds are incredibly smart, far smarter than humans.)

(That said, I tell swans that are out of line off the same way that I tell humans off when they’re out of line.)

This incident below happened on 5 November.

What exactly occurred here, I wondered?


(written to someone in the US on 7 November 2025)

For the record, I have brought these geese escarole (andijvie) a few times, mostly in the summer when there was almost no grass etc. I’ve known them for about 8 months and I mostly talk with them. On this occasion, I thought that giving them a bite to eat might be good. I brought them escarole the next day.

Humans are the greatest threat to life on the planet

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I’ve said that a few times before. It’s even truer than I thought. Yesterday, someone sent me the following.

Elephants had lots of relatives. Then humans came along

Today, three kinds of elephants walk the Earth. But hundreds of thousands of years ago, they had many kin. Nearly 200 species in the order Proboscidea, including mastodons and mammoths, have been described. Paleontologists have long wondered why so few of these usually massive mammals are still around. Now, a reexamination of fossil data suggests another group of mammals played a major role in dooming elephants’ relatives to extinction: humans.

With a little help from AI, researchers explored possible explanations for changing speciation and extinction rates of proboscideans over the past 35 million years, as estimated from fossil data. While their analyses, which leveraged neural networks to rank possible factors, identified connections to major environmental changes, the effects of humans were enormous. Extinction rates jumped five-fold when early humans emerged some 1.8 million years ago and climbed even more sharply—17-fold—when our species started spreading around the world roughly 129,000 years ago.

“The primary driver of proboscidean extinction was inferred to be the overlap with the human lineage, aligning with the growing body of evidence indicating humans’ severe impact on recent extinctions and on megafauna in particular,” the team concluded. “If early humans had not appeared, the number of species would probably still be increasing,” first author Torsten Hauffe told New Scientist.