Goose Mascots

Welcome to goose week on Ferrebeekeeper.  This week we are celebrating our big honking feathery friends with some posts about the place of geese in history, the arts, and in mythology…and in the real world too, where they can be found in oceans, ponds, fields, marshes, or the sky noisily eating everything with their serrated bills and um, redistributing nutrients in leal service to the nitrogen cycle.

But before we get to all of that, we are going to start with a comic visual post, because, despite the fact that geese are formidable mixed terrain omnivores, I find them somehow hilarious.  Costume makers and cartoonists seem to agree with me. Here is a small gallery of goose ridiculous goose mascots.

Honker the goose and Larry Longspur

Born in 1997, the Canada Goose named Canoose, came to life as Canada’s Team Mascot

This beautiful costume realistically evokes the precious moment of birth, as a gosling first pushes from its shell (it is not at all a horrifying mass of cheap cloth and nightmares)

Washington College’s own “Gus the Goose”

Are we really sure this is a goose?

I forgot all about Wawa–a store for petrol and chocolate milk

Does Mother Goose count?

Argh! I mean…a vintage mascot head from the eighties…

OK, that got a bit strange there at the end, but I think I have illustrated the hold that geese have on our heart (and it reminded me about Mother Goose–the whimsical, mythical all-mother at the center of fairytales).  Get ready! There are more geese on the way…