A Tail of a Cat and Goose

So a play on words, but we’ve met this cat before. This is Blue. Or at least that’s what our daughter thinks her name is. She is a local cat with no tail, but she is a beautiful cat. We always bump in to her in the same locale and always stop to say hello. It is no secret that I’m a dog person and not a particular fan of the “domestic” cat, something I just don’t trust. I can’t read them like a dog. Not blue though, she’s the cool cat, looks like she’s been around for a while, know’s her ground and doesn’t take shit. We’ve seen her just sit, and stare at dogs when they walk past. She doesn’t move an inch, or shy away at all. Stands her ground like she owns the spot. Not sure how old, but I’m guessing in her later years. She loves the attention, and after hearing another family walk by and say, “oh there she is”, I know she’s notorious.

Not uncommon to see Blue on one of our evening walks but this brief encounter lead to another tail (less) encounter.

Meet Winston. The canadian goose with no tail and a paris fashion week walk

As usual with our evening walk, we end up going around the local ponds to see the ducks, baby ducks, geese, not so baby geese and Gary the Greylag Goose who is a bit of nob.

As we got to the ponds, this Goose came “running” up to us. Not sure I’d call it running but imagine watching a fashion catwalk at twice the speed. It was quite the amusing sight. However as he got to us we couldn’t help notice that one, he was on his own when in the pond there were another 40+ Geese together, and two, had no tail feathers like Blue and her lack of tail. His walk was clearly an indication of a past injury but what was really unusual was his wanting to walk with us. Not asking for food, or trying to see us away, he actually walked most of the way around the ponds with us. Occasionally stop to eat some vegetation, and quickly catch up with us. So I named him Winston because that was the first name that came to mind.

My wife recalled one of the young Geese a few months ago, had an odd walk. And Winston did look a little on the smaller side so its possible that the rest of the group rejected him. Also possible that the rest of the group attacked him, resulting in him losing his tail feathers and some flight feathers? I can’t be sure Geese reject struggling young but other animals will do this. It did cross our minds to call an animal shelter to see if they could maybe take a look, but he was happy eating, could get around, albeit funny. And eventually saw him jump in the pond after a dog came nearby and happily swam around the pond. We decided to leave him be, and keep an eye on him on our small evening walks.

I’ll leave you with a small video of Winston, the Canadian Goose.