#Six Geese A Laying

[happyfreakshow]

Merry Christmas to all my friends on Tumblr!

[juliehowlin]

Geese

The word "goose" applies mainly to the female of the species. The male is a gander and the young are goslings. The collective noun "gaggle" applies to a group of geese on the ground. In flight, they are a skein, a team, or a wedge; when flying close together, they are called a plump.

10 things you didn't know about geese:

[carldoonan]

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Here's a set of "12 Days of Christmas" drawings that I never finished back in 2019.

[zaraillustrates]

Backyard farming popularity pushed up the price of six geese a-laying in this years’s PNC Christmas Price Index.

© Zara Picken 2022 www.zarapicken.com

[karenalma]

Christmas six and seven are done ✅

I’m kind of in love with the baby geese.

[clovus328]

I was bored today and decided to do the math on how many birds are gifted in “12 days of Christmas”

If we assume that every chorus is counting only new gifts and not recounting any they received on the previous day (because I think that’s funnier) and if we use the gold rings theory that every gift is, in fact, a bird.

We come out to a total of:

364 BIRDS!

Which coincidentally is enough birds for every day except Christmas.

This tally also implies that your true love has also gifted you 12 separate pear trees.

And if you were curious, if we assume that we’re only getting one new gift type each day then it’s a total of 78 birds, which frankly is not as many as I would’ve thought.

[floridaboiler]

[ellenhenryart]

Check out this awesome 'Six Geese of Christmas' design on @TeePublic!

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/53999726-six-geese-of-christmas

#christmas #christmasgeese #goose #sixgeesealaying #tshirtdesign #teepublic #ellenhenryart

[sesamenom]

six geese a-laying, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS! four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree

-

on the day 5 poll for what to do with the rings, "THROW IT AWAY" won at 30.9% as of drawing this, so great choice everybody! The authorities (manwe's pet geese) have been alerted and the rings have been disposed of.

now, for a totally unrelated question......

[timebombficexchange]

Update

We've decided to push the sign-up date to Season 2's release day on the 9th. So it is now 6! days until sign-ups close for our Secret Santa

[ami-ven]

Happy Sixth Day of Christmas!

[manquebusiness]

Maybe your true love knows you're trying to stock a game preserve, did you ever think of that?

[angrytheatremaker]

That was brilliant! Perfect, no notes.

on the thirteenth day of christmas my true love was investigated for his many flagrant violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918

[headspace-hotel]

Nature is healing.

I burned the Meadow a couple weeks ago. At first it looked like nothing but charred ashes and dirt, with a few scorched green patches, and I was afraid I'd done something terrible. But then the sprouts emerged. Tender new leaves swarming the soil.

My brother and I were outside after dark the other day, to see if any lightning bugs would emerge yet. We had been working on digging the pond. That old soggy spot in the middle of the yard that we called "poor drainage," that always splattered mud over our legs when we ran across it as children—it isn't a failed lawn, and it never was.

Oh, we tried to fill in the mud puddles, even rented heavy machinery and graded the whole thing out, but the little wetland still remembered. God bless those indomitable puddles and wetlands and weeds, that in spite of our efforts to flatten out the differences that make each square meter of land unique from another, still declare themselves over and over to be what they are.

So we've been digging a hole. A wide, shallow hole, with an island in the middle.

And steadily, I've been transplanting in vegetation. At school there is a soggy field that sadly is mowed like any old field. The only pools where a frog could lay eggs are tire ruts. From this field I dig up big clumps of rushes and sedges, and nobody pays me any mind when I smuggle them home.

I pulled a little stick of shrubby willow from some cracked pavement near a creek, and planted it nearby. From a ditch on the side of the road beside a corn field, I dug up cattail rhizomes. Everywhere, tiny bits of wilderness, holding on.

I gathered up rotting logs small enough to carry and made a log pile beside the pond. At another corner is a rock pile. I planted some old branches upright in the ground to make a good place for birds and dragonflies to perch.

And there are so many birds! Mourning doves, robins, cardinals and grackles come here in much bigger numbers, and many, many finches and sparrows. I always hear woodpeckers, even a Pileated Woodpecker here and there. A pair of bluebirds lives here. There are three tree swallows, a barn swallow also, tons of chickadees, and there's always six or seven blue jays screaming and making a commotion. And the goldfinches! Yesterday I watched three brilliant yellow males frolic among the tall dandelions. They would hover above the grass and then drop down. One landed on a dandelion stem and it flopped over. There are several bright orange birds too. I think a couple of them are orioles, but there's definitely also a Summer Tanager. There's a pair of Canada Geese that always fly by overhead around the same time in the evening. It's like their daily commute.

The other day, as I watched, I saw a Cooper's Hawk swoop down and carry off a robin. This was horrifying news for the robin individually, but great news for the ecosystem. The food chain can support more links now.

There are two garter snakes instead of one, both of them fat from being good at snaking. I wonder if there will be babies?

But the biggest change this year is the bugs. It's too early for the lightning bugs, but all the same the yard is full of life.

It's like remembering something I didn't know I forgot. Oh. This is how it's supposed to be. I can't glance in any direction without seeing the movement of bugs. Fat crickets and earwigs scuttle underneath my rock piles, wasps flit about and visit the pond's shore, an unbelievable variety of flies and bees visit the flowers, millipedes and centipedes hide under the logs. Butterflies, moths, and beetles big and small are everywhere.

I can't even describe it in terms of individual encounters; they're just everywhere, hopping and fluttering away with every step. There are so many kinds of ants. I sometimes stare really closely at the ground to watch the activities of the ants. Sometimes they are in long lines, with two lanes of ants going back and forth, touching antennae whenever two ants traveling in opposite directions meet. Sometimes I see ants fighting each other, as though ant war is happening. Sometimes the ants are carrying the curled-up bodies of dead ants—their fallen comrades?

My neighbor gave me all of their fallen leaves (twelve bags!) and it turns out that piling leaves on top of a rock and log pile in a wet area summons an unbelievable amount of snails.

I always heard of snails as pests, but I have learned better. Snails move calcium through the food chain. Birds eat snails and use the calcium in their shells to make egg shells. In this way, snails lead to baby birds. I never would have known this if I hadn't set out to learn about snails.

In the golden hour of evening, bugs drift across the sky like golden motes of dust, whirling and dancing together in the grand dramas of their tiny lives. I think about how complicated their worlds are. After interacting with bees and wasps so much for so long, I'm amazed by how intelligent and polite they are. Bumble bees will hover in front of me, swaying side to side, or circle slowly around me several times, clearly perceiving some kind of information...but what? It seems like bees and wasps can figure out if you are a threat, or if you are peaceful, and act accordingly.

I came to a realization about wasps: when they dart at your head so you hear them buzzing close by your ears, they're announcing their presence. The proper response is to freeze and duck down a bit. It seems like wasps can recognize if you're being polite; for what it's worth, I've never been stung by a wasp.

As night falls, bats emerge and start looping and darting around in the sky above. If the yard seems full of bugs in the day, it is nothing compared to the night.

I'm aware that what I'm about to describe, to an entomophobe, sounds like a horror movie: when i walk to the back yard, the trees are audibly crackling and whirring with the activity of insects. Beetles hover among the branches of the trees. When we look up at the sky, moths of all sizes are flying hither and thither across it. A large, very striking white moth flies past low to the ground.

Last year, seeing a moth against the darkening sky was only occasional. Now there's so many of them.

I consider it in my mind:

When roads and houses are built and land is turned over to various human uses, potentially hundreds of native plant species are extirpated from that small area. But all of the Eastern USA has been heavily altered and destroyed.

Some plants come back easily, like wild blackberry, daisy fleabane, and common violets. But many of them do not. Some plants need fire to sprout, some need Bison or large birds to spread them, some need humans to harvest and care for them, some live in habitats that are frequently treated with contempt, some cannot bear to be grazed by cattle, some are suffocated beneath invasive Tall Fescue, Kentucky bluegrass, honeysuckle or Bradford pears, and some don't like being mowed or bushhogged.

Look at the landscape...hundreds and hundreds of acres of suburbs, pastures, corn fields, pavement, mowed verges and edges of roads.

Yes, you see milkweed now and then, a few plants on the edge of the road, but when you consider the total area of space covered by milkweed, it is so little it is nearly negligible. Imagine how many milkweed plants could grow in a single acre that was caretaken for their prosperity—enough to equal fifty roadsides put together!

Then I consider how many bugs are specialists, that can only feed upon a particular plant. Every kind of plant has its own bugs. When plant diversity is replaced by Plant Sameness, the bug population decreases dramatically.

Plant sameness has taken over the world, and the insect apocalypse is a result.

But in this one small spot, nature is healing...

[sexchangedotcom]

yeah the bands i like are all pretty underground you probably havent heard of them. twelve drummers drumming. eleven pipers piping. ten lords a-leaping. nine ladies dancing. eight maids a-milking. seven swans a-swimming. six geese a-laying. five golden rings. theres more but like i said you wouldnt know them

[xt1me]

On the sixth day of cinemagraph-mas, tumblr gave to me..

Six Geese a-laying

I made an executive decision to stop paying attention to the numbers in the pics after 5 because it starts getting ridiculous.

Source: nest, egg