Found: Old, frozen, Canada Goose eggs

On our morning dog walk today, we passed by a nesting platform at the Rio Grande State Wildlife Area. Likely designed for Canada geese (maybe other birds also), the flat nesting platform is attached to a roughly 6'-high post, and the platform itself is surrounded by a fence-like barricade - maybe to keep the eggs & mother from rolling or falling off to the ground?

As we walked by the platform, Bruce noticed that there were three lone goose eggs sitting on the otherwise-empty platform. Since I'd never had the opportunity to hold a goose egg, I instructed him to gather all three of the eggs so I could pocket them for the walk home, to examine later. We surmised that something had happened to the mother goose during the spring '09 nesting period, thus leaving her eggs bare & unprotected. What was surprising is that the eggs were still completely intact - no cracks or anything. Why had no opportunistic predator come for this protein-filled treasure?

(The photo above shows a brown chicken egg--for scale--along with the three goose eggs.)

Once I returned home, I lightly rapped one of the eggs with a stick of wood, and it cracked open with a sound like gunshot! Since the contents were frozen, the shell was under some pressure. Sadly, in the one egg that I opened, evidence of an interrupted incubation was found by the presence of an incompletely-formed gosling.

These unfortunate eggs and their contents will become organic matter in one of my several compost bins, so their death won't be a total waste.