Six geese on about half an acre, and they spend a good part of the day pulling up mud and nibbling at the soil. Occasionally I watch one swallow a small stone quite deliberately.
They have grass, a balanced waterfowl pellet and water. Is eating dirt a deficiency I should be reading as a complaint about their feed, or just geese being geese?
The other two reasons are foraging and minerals. When they dig at soil they are mostly after roots, shoots, worms, grubs and seeds, and they swallow soil in the process rather than as the point.
Minerals come up in laying season particularly, when calcium demand jumps. If any of yours are laying, put oyster shell out alongside the grit. Those are two different things and people often provide one and think they have covered both.
Mine did this most in spring. It settled when I started leaving grit out properly.
What turns it into a problem: it looks excessive and obsessive rather than incidental, birds losing weight or looking unwell, droppings changing a lot, or them swallowing foreign objects rather than stones. Nails, screws, wire, plastic, string. Swallowed metal and sharp things cause serious internal injuries and they are not fussy.
So walk the half acre, especially anywhere there has been fencing or building work, and pick up every bit of metal and twine you find. That is a better use of an afternoon than worrying about the soil.
@insoluble_grit · 2w ago · 3 replies
The stone is the giveaway and it is the least worrying part. Birds have no teeth: they grind food in the gizzard, and to do that they need small stones and coarse particles, which is grit. Geese grazing on grass and fibrous plants need it more than most, because that is tough material to break down.
So offer insoluble poultry grit free choice. If they have natural small stones about they will help themselves, and if your ground is soft they may not have enough.
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@pulling_up_mud · 2w ago
Free choice meaning a dish of it left out permanently, rather than mixed into the feed?
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@insoluble_grit · 2w ago
A dish left out, yes, and they will take what they need. Mixing it into feed means they eat it in proportion to the pellet rather than in proportion to how much grass they have been pulling up, which is the wrong ratio.
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