CHAPTER XXIX.

_Catching and Tagging the Wild Goose._

This was a proposition that tested my staying qualities to a standstill, although it is true I had tagged lots of smaller birds, including the wild ducks; but that was like coaxing candy from a baby, too easy to be interesting.

Yes, some one has said, “the silly old goose!” But bear in mind that it is through this silly old goose’s ability to outwit the human race that there is one living; we would have killed and eaten them all, long ago, but they outwitted us and went over the top. So if they are silly, what is our number, if you please?

Well, silly or not, it took my little, single-cylinder brain over seven years to outwit them. Actually I studied them more than I did my financial obligations, and that’s saying a whole lot. Very true, they will allow me to walk among them, and odd, wounded ones have eaten from my hand. But don’t hold him, or interfere with his liberties, as one note from his beak will alarm all the geese within a mile.

In November, 1919, there were fifty-five ducks feeding here and when I pulled the trip-wire I caught fifty of them; but the “silly old goose” would walk by and say “A-h-h! A-h-h!” and my family would say “Ha! Ha!” The variety of contrivances I made during these seven years! And the blisters there were on my hands during that time, caused from cutting and fitting gas-pipe frames and trap-doors and stretching poultry netting over the same, are blisters I will long remember. Then to see the geese come, glance at it and walk away, would make any human being feel small enough to pass a ferret in a gun-barrel. In fact this got to be a family joke. Little Jasper said, “Papa, how many goose nets are you going to make this summer?” Yes, I am a firm believer in the words, “Let man have dominion over all,” but in this case I have surely been a poor actor.

At last a thought germinated that proved a success. I dug a canal forty feet wide and sixty feet long between two ponds. This canal was made at the mouth of the drain tile that supplies the ponds with spring water, the last water to freeze and the first to thaw out. A high gas-pipe frame was built to cover the whole canal, with a trap-door at each end. This was neatly covered with two-inch-mesh poultry netting, stretched good and tight to prevent it bagging and flapping in the wind. The trap-doors were left constantly up, and our domesticated geese were educated to winter under this, in the open water at the mouth of this drain tile. This contrivance is at the north ponds, where the geese remain quite wild.

It was completed in December, 1921, and March, 1922, found me away from home on a lecturing tour. When I opened a letter from my boy saying, “Father, your goose-net is a success; we saw fully twenty-five follow ours under, this morning,” can you really blame me for reading it twice?

In a week or so I arrived home, and was greeted with these cheering words, “Father, there were dozens of geese feeding under the net last night. We are feeding shelled corn and wheat under there, and the wild geese go under without ours leading the way.” Early the next morning I was up and dressed, and quite excited, for I was up in the little “oblookatory” long before the geese arrived from the lake; but sure enough, when they came fully forty went under to feed. And they were just as good as caught, for my previous experiments have taught me how to make a trap-door that works to perfection. Just picture, if possible, the way I was stepping around! Here I had been seven years catching one hundred and nine geese, and no two bunches were caught alike; in other words, every catch was an experimental failure! But now I am going to catch them by the hundreds. Yet I must not pull the trap-doors while the big flock is here, to frighten them all.

On April 21st fully eighty per cent. of them had gone north. Sunday morning, April 22nd, only about three hundred were here, and it was now or never, for that spring.

I climbed up and watched them while Dr. Rob Sloan, of Leamington, who is one of my greatest helpers, stood below to pull the trip-wire. The opportunity arrived. I signalled the doctor, the trap-door dropped in the twinkling of an eye—and sixty-one missionaries were in captivity!

In catching the sixty-one we found a pair tagged in 1917; two others had had their legs broken but were healed straight.

Well, now the big flock is gone, and they know nothing of this disturbance, so now I will enlarge on this successful plan, I thought. So in the summer of 1922 I completed my big net having over 5,000 feet of area in it. One trap-door is one hundred and twenty feet long, one eighty feet, and another forty feet; all three are dropped by the one trip-wire.

Even if I had the time I could not give you a detailed explanation of how my goose-trap, trip, and trap-doors, and so forth, are arranged. But if you want to catch wild geese for tagging purposes (and I hope you do) come to my home the first fifteen days in July, when the pond is dry, and get my plans, which have proved to be a success; then you can go home and add to them.

That fall, 1922, about 300 geese came back, but there was not much water as the spring was very low. Yet on December 5th I caught fifty-three, and on Saturday, April 21st, 1923, I caught two hundred and seven. Some catch! “Let man have dominion over all.” Now I have caught three hundred and twenty-one in one year.

While watching these last two hundred and seven gradually working their way under the net, my field-glasses showed eleven standing on the bank with bright aluminum tags on, but not a goose in the two hundred and seven had been tagged before. In other words, I have never caught a goose twice in the same net. “Silly old goose!”

Mind you, it is a job to tag two hundred and seven wild geese! And I had only one hundred and twenty tags made. When we got these all on, Dr. Sloan wiped the perspiration off his face with his goosey hands and said, “Jack, let’s let the rest of the bunch go without any religion.”

It will be plainly seen that we haven’t had time to hear from many of the three hundred and twenty-one that were caught during the last year or so; but out of the one hundred and nine that I caught between 1915 and 1921, sixty-two have been reported killed, and forty-nine of the tags are back in my possession, thirty-six reported at Hudson Bay; one from Hamilton Inlet, Labrador; fourteen from North Carolina; two from Maryland; one from New Jersey; four from Virginia; one from Illinois; one from Indiana; and one from the Ottawa River, thirty miles north of Montreal, Quebec.