About two weeks after the first pair of geese left with their goslings, a second pair came to the pond. The female gathered leaves and pine straw for a nest and after laying eggs began sitting on it. Mother geese lay one egg approximately every other day and do not stay on the nest until all eggs have been laid. By doing this all eggs have the same amount of incubation time and thus hatch at approximately the same time. The mother takes few breaks during the 30+ day incubation, however, this second mother may have been a 'new' mom because I saw both she and her mate leave the pond more than once (together) after she began consistently sitting on the nest. While the other mom had periodically left the nest to eat and drink, she never left the immediate area and rarely did her mate either.

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Here she is on the nest two weeks after the first family left.
The white patch on her face has a black indentation mark on the left side so I knew it was a different goose.
[An adult goose sits on the ground in a bed of leaves.]

About two weeks later on one of the days she was off the nest (but still at the pond), a family with two goslings came through the pond area and walked right through her nest. She and her mate squacked, but didn't try to physically stop the family. I don't know if that was because they were inexperienced parents or because they knew the other geese and were wary of them.

Here are the goslings from the 'interloper' family sitting beside her eggs.
[Two goslings sit end to end. One has its face toward the camera while we only see the back of the neck of the other's head. To the right of them by only a few inches are two eggs visible above the tops of the leaves.]

That was the beginning of the end for this clutch. She periodically returned to sit on the nest, but the continuity had been broken so the eggs were unlikely to hatch.

Here she is a week later rotating eggs. She sat on them for a while, but then left again.
There are other animals in the area which would go after eggs so I don't know if she removed the one in the foreground from the nest or some other critter did.
[The goose stands in the leafy nest and has her beak near one eggs which is mostly out of the nest. There is one egg about 18 inches from the nest that looks to have some growth on top of it.]

Six days later she was back on the nest again for a couple of hours.
[The goose sits on the leafy nest with the pond in the background.]

She and her mate periodically visited the nest over the next month. It was as if they were lost as to what they should be doing since they didn't have goslings to raise. The natural cycle had been disrupted.

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While the above nest was good news for the first pair but bad news for the second, sometimes a nest has both good and bad news. I noticed the nest below in the middle of the hillside leading to the stormwater drainage canals. While the nest by the pond had been under the shade of a tree, this mother picked an open area which meant she was in full Florida sun. While I didn't see her mate during her nesting time, I also didn't see her leave the nest until after her goslings arrived.

Here she is on her nest in late April 2015. The dark strip in the lower right corner is the water.
[The hillside is full of low-to-the-ground green vegetation except for a swath of dirt to the left of the goose and down the hillside to the water. She sits on the nest facing into the hillside.]

I noticed her with two goslings on May 13, 2015.
[The mother goose sits on the ground facing the camera. There is a gosling on either side of her. The one on the right is sitting while the one on the left looks to be trying to stand.]

She left with the goslings by the following morning leaving behind an egg that didn't hatch.
[A partially zoomed out view of the nest showing the greenery on the hillside around the nest. In the nest amid the visible downy feathers sits one brownish-white egg.]

Continue to page 7 to see what happens when parent geese defend their young.

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All photos © S. M. Garver