How to Hatch Goslings

This year, I bought a dinky old incubator off of Amazon. I wanted a Brinsea, but couldn’t justify dropping so much money on something that I had no idea how to use. So I got one for about $130 (Canadian dollars, folks) and tried to hatch a few chicks. I followed the instructions, which had clearly been translated from a foreign language, and hatched a small batch of eight chickens.

Sooo….fast forward a month and my female goose started laying again, after a little hiatus. She has been laying consistently throughout the summer, so I decided to stick a couple in the incubator. I was super excited, because I’ve been following Kirsten Lie-Nielsen @hostilevalleyliving on Instagram, and wanted to see if they would really imprint on us, because our other geese were already a year old when we got them. She published a guide last year, which is super if you’re thinking about adding geese to your farm. They can live for 20 years, so it’s a legit commitment if you don’t plan on eating them (the husband won’t do it).

I couldn’t find much info online–all the guides to hatching geese were waaaaay too detailed, and I got a little lost in the floral of it. I’m a meat and potatoes kind of girl when it comes to guides, so here’s a simple guide on how to htach goslings:

Prep your incubator

You’ve got to give it a good cleaning beforehand, with vinegar and dish soap. When all is said and done, that baby needs to be disinfected, before and after. That’s all I did between the chicks and the goslings. Then I put 100 ml of water in the bottom–no more, no less. You top the water up as you go–just no more than 100 ml at a time, especially if you’re working with a small incubator.

Set the Temp

Okay. This is tricky. The internet varied quite a bit on this. I set the temp at 37 C, which is 98.6 F for the first 25 days of incubation. At 25 days, I decreased the temp to 36.5 for the last three days, thinking they would hatch on Day 28–which is the standard incubation period for geese. Mine hatched on Day 33.

I had a mild panic attack, and thought they were dying. The eggs were moving a lot, but nothing was happening. So my advice to you is to be patient.

Turning the Eggs

You’re really best off to get an incubator that turns your eggs for you. If not, you’ll go nuts trying to remember to turn them four times a day. Nobody has time for that business. There’s some hardcore fowl people out there, but I’ve got kids over here. Just buy one with auto-turner, okay? (I did say that this was a simple guide to hatching goslings, right?)

Mist the Eggs

You’v got to mist the eggs twice a day. This means opening the incubator, spraying the eggs all over with a water bottle and letting them cool for five-ten minutes. Close up the incubator. The idea is that your misting mimics the action of the mother getting up, going for a swim, and coming back. I stopped misting on Day 25, when I put the incubator into lockdown mode.

Hatching

Once the goslings hatched, I waited for them to fluff up before I took them out to put them in the brooder. One was taking a little longer to get fluffy, so I used a hair dryer on the lowest setting and used it to help dry the little guy off (hold it very high up, so that you don’t hurt the gosling, if you find yourself needing to use a hair dryer).

As for the brooder, I use an infrared lamp, and leave them in for five-six weeks, with chick starter and fresh water. I also take them out for walks at night so they can eat fresh grass–something they do as soon as they can walk.