As you can see from the photo, he grew up to be a White Chinese gander.  In the fall we got him a Grey Toulouse mate named Tipsy (because she was slightly lame and walked wobbly -- her former owner named her.)  They took to each other right away, but Tipsy died in November 2002.  And therein lies a tale of great loyalty and heroism:

It was Thanksgiving morning.  When I first went into the coop, I saw Tipsy lying dead on the floor and Prince was all bloody.  Obviously, something had gotten into the coop.  I grabbed the live goose and headed for the house. My wife, Caryl, and I took him into the bathroom to clean him up.  He was wounded under his wing, but he would survive.  Since it was winter already and the pond was frozen, we filled the bathtub with water and let him swim around to clean himself up -- which he did.

When I went back down to the coop to get Tipsy's body, I saw that, although it was chewed up in one area, there was no blood on her feathers, nor was there any sign of blood on the floor around her.  It didn't take a forensics expert to tell me that she was already dead before whatever chewed on her body had arrived.  There was a hole under the wall that my cats used to go in and out looking for rodents, and I assumed that the intruder had come in that way. I plugged up the hole and shut the door securely. (At night I always close the little doors that the chickens use.)

The next day, I found out what that intruder was. A big oppossum was crouching in a corner.  It had apparently been sleeping under something and I had shut it in! I almost felt sorry for the poor thing, because if Prince had gone after it with his four-inch serrated beak, that critter was no doubt hurting bad. It was certainly in no mood to come out of the corner -- when I tried to shoo it out with a broom, it did the possum thing and played dead.  So I let the goose out and left the door open for the possum to escape, which it did -- never to come back.

An oppossum is basically a scavenger, not a hunter.  They will eat carrion, though.  So, as near as I can figure, the critter had been coming into the coop at night to steal some eggs or feed, and decided to have a meal of dead goose instead.  Prince the gander had defended his mate's body and gotten himself bitten in the struggle, but he won.  Geese are monogamous, they mate for life, and are loyal to the death. We humans could learn lot from geese!

Prince healed completely and is again lord of the barnyard. For a while, he was our only goose, and took to hanging out with the chickens to avoid being alone.  In the spring of 2003 we got four goslings  -- two Toulouse and two Africans -- that he immediately adopted as his own. (The male goose helps raise the young.  He had shown no interest in baby chicks, but recognized the cheeping goslings before I even got them out of the box!)  Plus, we took in a friend's pair of geese when she had hip surgery (the friend, not the goose!) and could not carry water to the barn in winter.  These two were not named, but we soon dubbed them "Lewis and Clark," because they took to exploring the area and leading expeditions down to a nearby pond (where the owner enjoys seeing them there, thank heavens!  You can Read their story and see pics on my blog, too.)

When the four goslings grew up, the two Toulouse turned out to be a male and a female who mated with each other. We eventually gave that pair to a nice lady north of us who wanted some geese for her pond.  I wasn't sure if Prince would re-mate, but he did.  He chose a female African  goose as his mate, and the extra African female hangs out with Prince, too. We named then Hagar and Sarah, after Abraham's wives.  So everybody is happy now.   And NOBODY here will ever be a "Christmas goose!"