Geese in Action

 

  

 

One of the things on today's to-do list was replenishing my store of hay for Odin. In a few short weeks, the growing season will start here and hay will no longer be needed. So, what I planned to do was head to the feed store and bring home a few bales at a time since everyone has run out of round bales. When I got to the feed store, it was closed. On to Plan B.

So, out comes the cell phone and I call this old man I know that has made himself quite a good living off of growing and selling top-notch hay. I fed this stuff last winter, and it was too top-notch. My horse became fat, too fat, dining on this caviar hay. This year, to avoid that outrageous weight gain, I bought less than stellar hay, and Odin did just fine on it. Of course when I ran out of hay, so did the source. Thankfully, this old man I know had square bales left, and I headed over to his farm to get enough to last me until the grass grows.

The drive over there is quite a little trip since this old guy's farm is way off the beaten path. I saw a pasture filled with buffalo, the next pasture filled with Brahma, and not much farther down the road, a pasture filled with miniature horses. Then I came up on a pickup truck slowly following two men riding horses down the road.

When I finally made it to the farm, there is this huge pond with geese just standing around. Since the old guy was busy with the men who came out to fix some tires on one of his flatbed trailers, I asked if I could go take some photos until he finished up.

I pulled up to the pond and found these two geese fighting away, making one hell of a ruckus. I was so excited that I whipped my camera out of its bag while opening the truck door. But, I didn't think to look down at the ground, I just assumed it was there; and when I stepped out of the truck in the hurry I was in, my foot landed on a large piece of gravel, my ankle twisted and down I went. (In self-defense, this gravel was of chunks the size of my feet, and it's definitely not made for walking on.) I didn't drop my camera, but it hit the ground too, and I flipped out about that. I checked it out good before I noticed that I had skinned the heel off my left hand and could feel that the same thing had happened to my left knee and shin.

The geese didn't care. But, I only managed to get the top photo of the two fighting before they quit and split off into pairs. The old man told me that he put out those barrels for the geese to nest in. It's so windy, he said, that anything they drag there to build a nest just blows away, and the barrels take care of that. He also said that I missed the flock of swan that had stopped long enough to hatch and raise some babies before they headed north.

A day late and a dollar short, that's me. On the drive home, I pondered what I saw and have to wonder why Mother Goose is so popular in children's stories. Those geese today didn't seem all that warm, fuzzy and cuddly!  And, in the same place I passed them, there's the two men riding the horses back the other way, only this time there's two pickups and both were leading two more horses.

I started feeling my minor injuries when I got home and had to unload the hay that I bought. Ouch!