[Surferchick]

Hi

I have nine geese that were hatched out in April/May this year and I wanted to know if anyone has any advice on how to tell which sex they are?

They are Ebdem or Ebdem/Toulouse cross and I plan to keep three of them going into next year - two females and one male.

Any advice much appreciated as I don't want to get it wrong and keep three males 

Thanks

El

[darkbrowneggs]

I keep Auto-sexing Geese, so the males are hatched yellow and grow up white and the females grey and grow up brown or pied. 

But I have noticed a slight difference in tone of call.  The males being a bit higher pitched and the females a  lower more sonorous tone.  Also the males tend to be on guard a bit more so their necks are up more often whereas the females rely on the males to watch so spend more time eating.  Again a bit difficult to be certain   

Best of luck anyway 

[Surferchick]

Thanks, will look out for those things as think it may be a process of elimination!

I know one of them is a definate male as he keeps charging and hissing at the dog! Dog looks quite confused by it all 

[themagicaltoad1]

I had 2 of these lovely geese, now gone to live with Kate and her ducks. Apparently they are best sexed as newly hatched or while still very young, after that it get hard to tell their "bits" apart.

[Kate and her Ducks]

I was also interested to see if there was an easy answer to this due to the afore mentioned geese. I have started to think that Lily might be a boy as she always seems to be keeping watch over Kevin who is fractionally smaller
Will wait to see what spring brings.

[themagicaltoad1]

Lily was sexed by the farmer when we bought her, he was certain she was a girl. We insisted on a female as we hadn't got a clue what sex Kevin was and didn't want to end up with 2 ganders. Lily has always been the braver one of the 2, possibly because her first few weeks were with a lot of other geese. Hope they're still getting on well with you.

[themagicaltoad1]

I've just remembered, we mentioned to the farmer that Kevin had a couple of odd black feathers on his/ her back when young, he told us only the females have them, (Lily also had them). It might help with sexing yours surferchick.

[Surferchick]

Thanks for all the replies

Have managed to sex all the geese last weekend so now know what we are doing - I think 

Will tell you what we did as it might be helpful - started off by using process of elimination, we watched to see which was the most dominant and aggressive goose/gander (this was the one that had previously tried to charge the dog!) We took him away, tagged his leg and moved him into our stable.

We did this a few times as, as soon as we removed the dominant male another male stepped in to take his role. we also identified two birds that we thought were definate females.

We then noticed after a few times that when my hubby was holding the goose/gander in front of him, supporting it under it's legs, so that I could tag it's leg, that the males had 'something' protruding from it - which is why we knew it was a male (if you get my drift).

We then used this method to check the birds we had left, which was very quick and easy so we could tell for definite. We re-checked the two we had tagged as female and we were right.

I think you could use this 2nd method if you only had two birds and whilst it is quite difficult to explain, I can assure you it was really easy, quick and the geese didn't even blink.

Hope this helps - any questions pls ask and will try and help further.

El