June 2003

Something unusual was happening at the nest that day when I decided to shoot some pictures of the breeding female Canada Goose surrounded by fresh green spring grass.

In the past weeks I checked every other day the Canada Geese nest, which the birds decided to build on a narrow mud bar in a pond directly near a secondary street. A very good location for me as the birds will have become accustomed to close human presence and therefore will have not been stressed by a photographer and his equipment only 5 meters away from the nest. As a matter of fact I often spent some hours there while the female bird was simply sleeping on the nest. Evidently the Geese did not expect any threat from me.

For that reason I could hardly understand why that day the female Goose was acting like nervous. It looked like the bird could not find the right position on the eggs. 

I kept my eye on the viewfinder for more than 40 minutes until suddenly a tiny yellow head found its way through the compact mother's plumage and looked to the outside world!

A little gosling, probably just 10 minutes old, was still wet and mother Goose kept it under her wings well protected against the chilly afternoon wind.

Every once a while the female raised her wing giving me the chance to take a glimpse of the offspring. It was always very fast and the green grass was hiding the nest, but I recognized 4 goslings. 

Even though the dark clouds and the strong cold wind shrunk my photographic chances almost to zero, that day I went back home fully satisfied. I had the wonderful opportunity to be there when the little goslings looked at the world for the first time!

The next morning I found a similar scene, but with two major differences.

The goslings were fuzzy after a  night spent in the cozy warmth of their mother's plumage and they were clearly impatient to explore the world: the mother could hardly keep them from leaving the nest!

This gave me better opportunities to take pictures, but being that morning very cloudy too, I had to live with shutter speeds of about 1/50. 

I used the fill-in flash with extender to bring a bit more detail in the dark parts of the goose's plumage. Flash was set at -1.7 stop.

The pictures below show the great patience of the breeding Canada Geese. 

The incubation begins in April when a late snow storm can make the nest very uncomfortable (left below). The female only stays on the eggs for approximately 28 days, standing snow, ice, wind, rain and sun.

The last two pictures show the same female on the same nest: during the incubation the old yellow grass was replaced by fresh green spring grass. 

The steadiness of the breeding goose compared with the color changing vegetation around impressed me a lot.