The snow continues to come down, and I’ll soon head home to wrap up, read, and wonder if I’ll see the Great Krauss/Harris Debate tomorrow. In the meantime, I was amused and then saddened by this tw**t, sent by Grania:
Leaving journalism because I'll never be able to write a better headline than this one. pic.twitter.com/rQprQ4WwOc
— Madison Malone Kircher (@4evrmalone) February 9, 2018
The headline and story come from Metro, and the backstory is ineffably sad. Yes, Thomas, a goose from New Zealand, fell in love with a black swan named Henry, and courted him for 24 years. The swan’s heart was then stolen by a female black swan named Henrietta, and the goose, a third wheel, stayed and helped the pair of swans raise 68 cygnets over the next six years. Then things went really downhill, including the loss of Thomas’s sight:
His complicated relationship made him a local celebrity with many birdwatchers spending hours watching his love life unfold.
But his happiness came to an end when Henry died in 2009 and Henrietta flew off with another swan, leaving Thomas all alone. He eventually went on to father his own babies, but they were then stolen by another goose called George.
Thomas was then taken to the Wellington Bird Rehabilitation Trust in 2013 as his health deteriorated
The trust said: ‘As well as making other blind bird friends to spend his days with, Thomas helped foster a couple of broods of cygnets along the way. ‘
[That was] for nostalgic reasons and boy, did he do a good job. ‘He lived for corn on the cob and if it wasn’t there when we put him back into his house at night, he was not happy.’
Thomas just died at 40. Rest in peace, fair unrequited goose.
Here’s Henry helping his faithless friends:
OH dear. Aren’t dinosaurs wonderful?
I guess that was his swan song.
OY!
…vey!
LOL
Swan singular sensation.
Love it! XD
To me, the story is beautiful and not sad. I suppose that the life of the goose, though non-standard, was happy and fulfilled.
Wait, wasn’t this the plotline for John Schlesinger’s film Sunday Bloody Sunday?
This was the all-water-fowl remake.
No ,the plot line was British soldiers kill unarmed Irish people.
Just joking,if it is possible to joke about such things.
I think it should be “the Great Krauss/Harris/Dillahunty Debate”.
We had such a story at Morge, a nice little city along the shore of Geneva lake: a gander called claxon acted several years as a helper for a swan family. Then the male swan disappeared, Klaxon stayed with the female, and they got three hybrid cygno-goslings, very different from each other. They are pictures of the family here. I don’t know the further developments of the story…
I can’t open the link, but apparently a goose-swan hybrid is called a swoose.
Sent the lovely human interest story, Metro version, to about 10 more people.
What a curious creature!