Danger Lurks in the Cold of Night

The lone survivors of a frosty, midnight attack...reunited.

Although all the birds are domesticated, the ducks can fly, albeit briefly, just above the trees.

 

Like everywhere else in the country, it has been cold here…downright frigid. We reached a low this month of -27, tying an all-time record. I’ve managed to stay warm with an electric heater in my office and a well-stoked fireplace. But my worry has been for my outdoor friends.

 We live on three acres of hilly, rural property bordered by a fresh water creek overgrown with bramble and wild flowering crab trees. Alongside the creek is an island sanctuary, created some twenty years ago by my father-in-law. The sanctuary is a small island surrounded by a moat, something like a little pond where birds, wild and domestic can safely nest or flee the terror of coyotes, plentiful here in the hog and corn country of the Midwest.

Canadian geese nest each year at the hatching place of the female.

We built our house on a hill just above the wild-life shelter ten years ago and enjoyed watching the Canadian Geese that flew in every March, nested as pairs, and disappeared shortly thereafter, following the creek north to a larger body of water, a lake, where their families grew through the summer. In the fall, they migrated south and we again awaited their spring return.

I so enjoyed the geese, that I bought White China Geese, domestic birds that cannot fly and so will never migrate from me. I order the geese through a catalog and they arrive on a scheduled plan through the mail. Once here, we nurture their growth in a cattle trough with a light bulb dangling overhead until they are strong enough to survive the elements on their own…a couple of weeks. When that day comes, they are put into the sanctuary to make friends with whomever else may come along, Canadian Geese and unknown ducks and herons that drop by for a visit. I usually have to teach them how to get into the water and hopefully learn to save themselves from the dangers of nature: raccoons, turtles, and other critters that crawl through the wild wire that banishes coyotes and other larger prey from the habitat.

 Just before the weather went south, so to speak on the thermometer, I was commenting to my husband on how beautiful our geese looked on new-fallen snow. If it weren’t for their bright orange beaks and webbed feet, they would go unnoticed against the winter backdrop. How humanly naive I was!

 
The coldness of this winter weather and the beautiful blanket white have joined with the coyotes in a war against my birds! Hungry, the coyotes have become even more cunning in their search for food and last week, several were able to break into the sanctuary and challenge the safety of the China White Geese.  The Geese need open water for safety, but the bone-chilling cold had frozen the pond fully over.  In the morning, when I looked to the pond  could see where the geese tried to escape into the open water, but the water, no longer open, was no longer their refuge; instead the winter freeze and the yipping coyotes had united to destroy my birds, some of whom I had tended for six or seven years

Well, I won’t belabor the story. One of the geese survived and begged me to free it from the refuge that had now become a holding room for the condemned. I opened the gate and freed it to the creek and for hours, it honked (the truly honk!) for friends now gone. One lone surviving goose. I was equally heartbroken. I checked on it hourly, even as the temperatures hovered below the zero mark. Finally, it lost its voice!
 
The next day, a full forty-eight hours after the murderous blitz of the coyotes, I heard another honking…and I followed the call into the wooded area running between the cornfield and creek. There, I found a second survivor…a White China Goose, waddling through the bramble of multi-flower rose, weak but alive.

In -20 degree temperature, I coaxed my first found goose down the creek bed to reunite the pair of old friends. It wasn’t easy. The goose I had first discovered was scared and didn’t want to move upstream. The goose I had just found was weak, so weak, he limped and lumbered; he didn’t want to move, but somehow, he had survived while his friends were savagely killed and eaten. Some left for dead, their bodies mangled but not consumed. I literally crawled beneath the overgrown brambles, coaxing the birds to move and meet. My work was rewarded. They came together and happily so!
 
I have been worried, sure the coyotes would return. But nearly two weeks have passed and still the White China Geese float on the creek, now enjoying the corn we have placed along the banks to save them from venturing out for food.