Guardian of the porch. Star of our videos. Survivor of the basement. He is concrete, he is painted, and he has never once moved from our hearts.
Every hero has a dark chapter. His began with a foot that was no longer attached.
Chained up below the shop, he waited. He did not complain. He is concrete.
Fixed, freshly painted and back on his rock, he returned stronger than ever, and better dressed.
He changes forms with the seasons. Pick one yourself, or let fate decide. Each form brings its own weather.
Turn your sound up. Typing "honk" anywhere on this page works too.
Goose Goose's extended family. The true geese belong to two living genera: Anser, the grey and white geese, and Branta, the black geese. A few birds called geese belong to neither.
Branta canadensis · true goose
Anser caerulescens · true goose
Branta leucopsis · true goose
Branta bernicla · true goose
Anser canagicus · true goose
Anser indicus · true goose
Branta sandvicensis · true goose
Anser anser · true goose
Anser cygnoides · true goose
Alopochen aegyptiaca · not a true goose
Domestic breed · Goose Goose's real-life lookalike
The spiky rows on a goose's bill and tongue are tomia, made of cartilage rather than enamel. They grip and tear grass, roots and water plants, and barbs at the back of the tongue keep food from coming back up.
IFLScienceCanada geese use ten vocalizations, each for a different situation. A confrontation usually opens with a high-pitched hiss.
Wikipedia: Canada gooseAn exceptionally large male giant Canada goose weighed 10.9 kg with a 2.24 m wingspan, the largest wild goose on record.
Wikipedia: Canada gooseWhite and blue snow geese interbreed. A single dominant gene for the dark form decides which one a gosling becomes.
Wikipedia: Snow gooseHonking, hissing, wing flapping and head pumping. Goose Goose relies on a fifth: staring.
Forest Preserve District of Will CountyGeese grow feathers from pores that look like human hair follicles. A plucked goose's skin is covered in little bumps, just like ours when we're cold or scared.
Wikipedia: Goose bumpsCanada geese start looking for a mate at two or three, and pairs often stay together for a decade or more. Geese stay paired all year.
Will County, WikipediaA Canada goose lays 2 to 9 eggs, about 5 on average, and incubates them for 24 to 32 days. A pair raises one brood a year.
Wikipedia: Canada gooseGoslings can walk, swim and find their own food as soon as they hatch, and they bond with whatever they see first. Konrad Lorenz showed that incubator-hatched birds would follow him instead, work that shared the 1973 Nobel Prize.
Wikipedia, Nobel PrizeYoung Canada geese fly at 6 to 9 weeks, and stay with their parents until the following spring.
Wikipedia, Will CountyAdults molt in late June or early July and can't fly for about a month.
Will CountyFlocks fly in a V, which takes about half the energy of flying alone, swapping leaders as they tire. Geese navigate partly by Earth's magnetic field and spend up to 85% of migration resting at stopovers.
Will County, WikipediaWild Canada geese that reach adulthood live about 10 to 24 years. The oldest on record was a 33-year-old female tagged in Ohio in 1969.
Wikipedia: Canada gooseOne bar-headed goose tracked over the Himalayas. The tracked geese spent 95% of their time below 5,784 m.
WikipediaThe cliffs barnacle goslings jump from to reach their feeding grounds.
WikipediaBreeding lesser snow geese, more than 300% higher than in the mid-1970s.
WikipediaA domestic goose can lay up to 100 eggs a year, against 5 to 12 for a wild goose.
WikipediaThe earliest evidence of domestic geese comes from the Hemudu culture on China's Lower Yangtze River, about 7,000 years ago. Egypt has archaeological evidence of domestic geese more than 4,000 years old.
Domestic geese come from two wild birds: the greylag in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia, and the swan goose in eastern Asia. Some breeds reach 10 kg, more than double their wild ancestors.
Geese are loud, quick to notice unusual movement, and the gander puts himself between a threat and his family. People have put that to work:
The Meidum Geese, six painted geese from the tomb of Nefermaat in Egypt, considered a masterpiece of Egyptian art and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They show greylag, greater white-fronted and red-breasted geese.
Wikipedia: Meidum GeeseGauls climb Rome's Capitoline Hill in the dark. The sacred geese of Juno honk and wake the guards.
World History EncyclopediaMany believed barnacle geese grew from barnacles, so some clerics ate them on fast days as "not meat." Pope Innocent III banned eating them during Lent. The myth lasted until the late 1700s.
Wikipedia: Barnacle goose"Mother Goose" stories turn up in French writing by 1650. Charles Perrault's fairy tales become known as Contes de ma mère l'Oye, Tales of My Mother Goose.
Wikipedia: Mother GooseSelma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: a shrunken boy crosses Sweden on the back of Martin, a white farm goose. Written as a geography reader for schools, it put Nils and his goose on Sweden's 20-krona note until 2015.
WikipediaRoast goose is a European Christmas favorite, a German Christmas Day staple, and traditional on St. Martin's Day.
Wikipedia: Christmas gooseUntitled Goose Game, made by four people in Melbourne, wins Game of the Year at both the Game Developers Choice Awards and the D.I.C.E. Awards and sells over a million copies by year's end. In it, the goose must impersonate a concrete goose.
Wikipedia, Wikipedia: Concrete gooseThe concrete goose, also called the porch goose or lawn goose, is an American lawn ornament with a wardrobe. Goose Goose stands in a long, proud line.
Concrete geese reportedly first appear around the middle of the century, supposedly in the upper Ohio River Valley. Nobody knows for sure.
The Spokesman-Review / Washington PostPeak goose. Porch geese spread across the Midwest, with a strong presence in Chicago. Owners dress them for holidays, for the weather, or just because.
Wikipedia: Concrete goose, The Spokesman-ReviewCarla Bruni of the Chicago Bungalow Association links them to loyalty and to the story of the geese that alerted Rome. Geese have long guarded farms, so a goose by the door may be a sign of protection.
The Spokesman-Review / Washington PostThe revival. Seasonal outfits flood TikTok. One retailer sells more than 60 goose outfits from $19.99 to $34.99, and the yellow raincoat remains a classic.
Apartment Therapy, The Spokesman-ReviewThe Porch Goose Club of America on Facebook passes 200,000 members, who compete for porch goose of the month.
The Spokesman-Review / Washington PostGoose Goose keeps watch over The Blessed Fig Tree in Antigo, Wisconsin, in whatever the season calls for.
Not science. Just how things are done around here.
More than 33,000 acres, one of the largest freshwater marshes in the United States, a refuge since 1927, and a Wetland of International Importance. Wisconsin's DNR estimates 100,000 to 200,000 geese stop there each fall.
By fall 1965, 121,000 geese stopped at Horicon, and agencies tried to scatter them with planes and airboats. Wisconsin sued the federal government in 1966. By the mid-1970s about a quarter million Canada geese gathered there, and the hazing failed: geese return to the places they know.
The giant Canada goose was thought extinct in the 1950s, until Harold Hanson found a small flock wintering in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1962.
While the wild geese pass over in their skeins, Goose Goose holds his post at 800 5th Ave in Antigo. Come see what he's wearing.
Not real ones. The serrated edges of the bill and the spikes on the tongue are tomia, made of cartilage, used for gripping and tearing plants. IFLScience
Geese form pairs that stay together all year, and Canada goose pairs often last a decade or more. If one dies, the other finds a new mate. Will County
It saves energy, about half compared with flying alone according to studies, and helps the flock keep track of each other. The lead bird drops back when it tires; in families, the parents usually lead. Will County, Wikipedia
To call to each other and to warn. In Canada geese the male's call is the honk and the female's is a shorter, higher "hrink," and they have ten calls in all. Wikipedia
Canada geese are mainly vegetarian: grasses, grains like wheat, rice and corn, and water plants, with the odd insect or small fish. The emperor goose is the exception, living mostly on shellfish. Wikipedia: Canada goose, Emperor goose
Not a true goose. It's most closely related to the shelducks, and only got the name because it swims well and looks heavy in flight. Wikipedia
Ask Rome. Geese are loud, aggressive toward threats and alert to unusual movement, and they've guarded aircraft, a whisky warehouse and a national border. Wikipedia
Owners dress them for holidays, for the weather, or purely as decoration. It's been part of the tradition since the 1980s. Wikipedia
Sources: Wikipedia: Goose and the sources above
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