A gang of baby geese, some pretty flowers, and some destruction

There has been a bit of time since the last blog post.  Family matters took precedence, but I hope to post more regularly again.  Thanks for coming back to check!

I was happy to see that the Egyptian goose parents again brought their 9 babies to the backyard after an absence of almost a week.  They really grow very fast, and are already more like juveniles who are getting some of their adult feathers in.  They look a mess with the combination of baby fluff and new feathers and are voracious eaters to fuel all that growth and change.  Just a week ago they were mostly cute fluffy babies!  It seems like "cute" is a thing of the past!

 

    The group eats with gusto, jumping right into the water bin.

I have a video of the kids eating that you can see on YouTube by clicking here.

 

In this photo you can see the stubs of the little guy's big-boy wing feathers that are starting to come in.  He's a conglomeration of baby fluff and real feathers.

This guy is a scruffy mess, and you can see where his wing feathers are coming in.

He has a spiky punk rocker hairdo!

Sometimes, the little ones flap their wings to test them out.  It really looks cute.

Soon he'll be able to take off and fly.  But not yet.

 

You can already tell which of the babies are boys and which are girls.  The boys grow so much faster.

Bigger brother and smaller sister standing tall and proud like the big geese.

 

Mom and dad watched carefully over the whole crew the whole time.  They are excellent parents.

Mom and dad looked in all directions.

The kids gathered on the lawn after lunch.

Enough of the geese.  The flowers on the patio and in the hanging baskets outside are blooming well.  The dahlia is opening beautifully, the lantana is in full bloom, and the petunias are looking pretty too.

Almost fully opened.

Butterflies love these lantana flowers.

The pretty petunias make the kitty smile.

As if there hasn't been enough turmoil with all the heavy equipment tearing up the trees along the canal, now we have a developer, who purchased the old golf course, clearing the land so he can build across the canal.  Sadly, they have removed most of the greenery and I'm upset that they took down the old dead tree that the osprey and hawks used to perch on and look down to see if there was any prey.  We won't be seeing those very much now that their favorite branches are gone.

This machine chewed everything up.

Last look at the osprey branches on the right.  All these bushes and trees are gone now.