Legacy

Just take a gander at this story.  My name is Jonathan Gander, don’t laugh, it’s the name I was born with. I raise special geese.  How special is what this tale is all about.

 

I reside on a farm in Paqanaw County, Pennsylvania.  I used to raise mostly chickens.  All kinds of  chickens.  Yes even those Easter Egg Chickens that laid various pastel colored eggs.  I raised them for their eggs that I marketed and for the fanciers of exotic types, I raised the live ones for sale as chicks or adults as breeding stock.

 

Now outside of the Easter Egg Chickens, all others laid either brown or white eggs.  They were what I had the most of and they were the basis of my thriving egg business.  I don’t know why to this day that Easter Egg Chickens laid a variety of colors, God made them that way is all I could figure.

 

I also had a few ducks and turkeys as well as the geese and chickens.  There was a more limited market for their eggs, I don’t know why, that’s just the way it was.  Their eggs were bigger with a more unique flavor, but quite tasty.

 

I’d really noticed for a long time the fact the same kind of chickens laid both the brown eggs and white eggs.  It was a question of how come that had haunted me for sometime.  So I thought I’d try and figure it out.  I had two pens and henhouses about a hundred feet apart with hens of the same type in both pens.

 

Both pens hens produced white or brown eggs, but one pen’s eggs were 90% white and the other 90% brown.  That was too much to be pure coincidence.

 

I did soil analysis which told me very little. I knew the feed I put out in both pens was identical. So there was no clue there.  Now I also knew hens liked to scratch and put gravel and so forth in their craws.  So I checked the grass and weeds in each pen, pretty much the same.

 

Then I noticed one big difference between the pens.  The one where the brown eggs were predominate, had a Chestnut tree growing over part of it.  The Chestnuts would fall to the ground or be knocked down by squirrels who would make little pieces out of the Chestnut shells.  The hens would peck them even more reducing the shell fragments to more minute pieces.  They would ingest those like it was gravel to work in their craws.

 

I thought Bingo I’m on to something.  I gathered up a bunch of Chestnuts, took the shells off and pulverized them. Then I tossed them into the pen where mostly white eggs came from.  I did this for a few weeks and slowly but surely those hens were now laying mostly brown eggs.  That made me very happy because brown eggs always brought a premium.

 

Then for a lark, at least at the time that was the only reason, I mixed crushed Chestnut shells in with the Goose feed.  After a few weeks I started getting brown goose eggs.  That was a famous first. I was getting impressed with myself.

 

I said wouldn’t it be nice if like in the Jack and The Beanstalk Story, I had a Goose that laid Golden eggs.  Well I went on with my routines for a few days, but that thought kept haunting me.  I decided to see if it was possible to modify a gooses diet even more and get Gold colored eggs.

 

Well I tried one additive after another a few weeks at a time for each, still only the brown goose eggs, which were still a notable accomplishment.

 

Then one day in checking the goose nests after the last additive change, I found my first Gold colored egg.  They were viable eggs that would hatch a gosling or taste good in a frying pan.

 

That would perhaps be a waste of product as I suspected the market value would be in the shell.  Sucked out it would be a collector’s prize.  Well I kept watching and over the next few weeks almost all of the eggs were of a Gold color.  I started sucking out their contents and gently rinsed out the shell.  I started stock piling those Gold colored shells and when I had a goodly amount of them, I began to advertise.

 

The demand was overwhelming, almost beyond belief.  I was getting one hundred dollars per egg shell.  Some folks insisted on buying viable eggs that could be hatched.  I never turned down a paying customer.  I suspect some thought if a female goose hatched from a Gold colored egg, then that goose would lay Gold colored eggs.  They didn’t know my secret and I’m not responsible for erroneous assumptions.

 

Needless to say, my fortune was made by the Geese who laid the Golden eggs.