Chester

Like other geese, they lay their eggs in Spring and the eggs take 30 days to hatch into goslings, which can swim within a day or so.

These geese, like other geese and swans and ducks are all from the anatidae, or duck family.

In the wild this family are exceptionally good and long-distance flyers, some of them migrating for thousands of miles. They therefore have large and strong breast muscles - one reason for their being domesticated by man, the other being that God allowed it - they are a ‘clean’ family of which Noah took seven pairs onto the Ark.

Wild geese migrate in groups called skeins, which take a V formation for the most efficient flying. The leadership changes often, can be of either sex, and the followers ‘honk’ encouragement to it, as it has the hardest job to do. (A lesson for us all too?)

Most domestic geese have been bred from the Greylag wild goose, but the thickset Chinese Goose is the exception, being bred from the slender Asian Swan-goose. Like other geese, they lay their eggs in Spring and the eggs take 30 days to hatch into goslings, which can swim within a day or so.

They eat grain and grass.