Steinbacher Geese

The newest addition to our collection are a pair of Steinbacher Geese. We had admired these lovely birds for a couple of years and in March this year we received a phone call to say a friend needed a home for a gander quickly, four days later we had a pair of Geese! As we had never kept geese before we thought it would be a steep learning curve, the first question being why were they not eating much feeding? Being used to Aylesburies whose feeders always seem to need filling, the geese ate very little. Did they not like the feed? Were they just getting used to their new surroundings, or were they ill? In actual fact it was very simple – in a pen which had lots of grass they did not need much feed (as we found out when we got a book on keeping geese).

Geese suffer from a bad reputation for being vicious and noisy but Steinbachers can get very tame and our two are no exception, they love a little treat of brown bread and apart from a bit of chatter in the morning are fairly quiet. We were delighted when our goose laid her first egg and have since hatched a few goslings.

One big advantage of the geese to us is the large amounts of grass they eat, especially the goslings – the duck pens always used to get rather overgrown as summer arrived but the geese are helping to control this (saving a lot of strimming). They are also mixing well with both the Call ducks and Aylesburies which makes life easy as we can rear them all together.