Goose began sitting on her nest on May 11th, 4 eggs underneath her (and one golf ball as seen in a previous post; http://listonian-institute.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-quizname-that-snake-and-what-is-he.html ).
She's been laying eggs since the middle of February, probably 40 in total. This process has been a very interesting one. She laid an egg every other day and it took about 12 hours for each one. Once the egg was laid, she'd leave the nest and go back to her daily routine. The eggs remain fertile and viable for about 10 days - we learned this the hard way. Then on May 11th, she laid the last egg and has been incubating them ever since. The justation period is between 28-30 days. During that time, she leaves those eggs only once or twice a day for 10 minutes at most; just enough time to get a drink of water and get herself wet. Evidently the water helps to control the humdity and temperature of the eggs. She's probably lost half of her body weight in the last month as I think she's only eating just enough to survive. Geese process their food within 7 minutes, so if she ate any more than that, the nest would look like Mark's underwear.
The picture above was taken at 5pm today. You can see two small cracks in the bottom right of that top egg. Seeing it is a whole different experience. The crack pops up and down as the baby is trying to break free. I've read it takes about 2 days to completely free itself. It has a "shell tooth" at the end of it's beak for just this purpose. We're very excited - stay tuned - more to come......
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