It’s Officially Now ‘Three Geese Farm’

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The farm at last has an official name: Three Geese Farm. In the past few weeks, a trio of Canada geese have taken up residence in Pancho’s Pond. We have named them Moe, Larry and Curly after an iteration of the Three Stooges, one of my favorite shows as a child. When a fourth goose showed up one morning, he was quickly dubbed Shemp by daughter Mere, in for a quick visit from Germany. When a total of seven Canada geese were seen cruising the pond or pecking the ryegrass, I gave up naming them. I can’t tell them apart anyway. If we get too close to them, we are liable to scare them off. So we enjoy them from a distance.

Pancho the Donkey recently approached one of the geese who was pecking the ground and was promptly rewarded for his curiosity by a furious fowl, flapping wings and honking loudly, fast on his tail. He hightailed it to the back of the lot, eager to get out of harm’s way.

The same thing happened decades ago to Mere at Teague Park, here in Longview, which has a nice lake and a permanent gaggle of snow geese. She was about 4, and we had inexplicably nicknamed her Goose That appellation hung around her neck until she was practically out of college. My mom got a photo of the chase, and my dad made a pastel drawing and named it “Wild Goose Chase.” The drawing still hangs in our house.

The geese are a welcome addition, and generally it is only the trio of them. They go somewhere else at night, perhaps to the larger pond across the road. The Three Stooges return about 7 a.m. each day, gliding in smoothly for a landing on the water. It is a lovely sight.

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On Valentine’s Day, my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I waited eagerly at a local feed store for the arrival of the Fish Wagon. It was time to stock Pancho’s Pond with baby fish, and the Fish Wagon was making a stop in Longview on that day. When I placed the order, the woman on the other line joked, “Don’t make that your wife’s Valentine’s Day present.” She does not know my BMC, who was thrilled to get the pond stocked for that day. (I got her other presents as well. No sense pushing my luck.)

With the Fish Wagon woman’s help, I placed the order. The truck had several tanks from which a worker fetched the fish and put them in three large, water-filled bags. We hurried home with 60 bluegills; 30 red-ear sunfish; 20 catfish; 10 large-mouthed bass; and 2 pounds of minnows. As instructed, we kept them in the bags and put them in the pond, so the fish could acclimate to its water temperature. I was worried a bag would float away, so I tied them with hay bale twine to sticks.

Pancho, meanwhile, was very interested in this process, peering over my BMC’s shoulder. After about 30 minutes, we let the fish loose. A few minnows had gone belly-up, but the others seemed unscathed. Now we wait.

A couple days earlier, a friend helped me install a fish feeder, which he and his wife had given me months earlier for my birthday. We attached it to an unused cedar post he already had and filled the base with concrete mix. The Fish Wagon woman said not to start feeding until mid-to-late April, when the water warms up. But we are ready.

Pancho’s Pond has a culvert at one end that serves as a spillway, since it is spring fed. The water meanders down a couple of ditches the pond builder pulled, all the way to Glade Creek near the eastern edge of our acreage. The ditches are flowing steadily with all this rain. I worried the fish would follow course, so we pounded a pair of T-posts on each side of the culvert and attached a piece of hardware cloth screen. The fish will be staying in the pond, not floating down Glade Creek to Little Cypress Creek and eventually to Caddo Lake.

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The geese left when we showed up with the bags of fish. They came back the next day, and I did not see any fish floating belly up. So far, so good. Three Geese Farm is perking up, but I doubt we will be wetting any lines until at least next year.

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