A rehabilitated Canada goose is reluctant to be set free after spending the last two weeks with a local animal rescue volunteer in Williams Lake.
Sue Burton made several attempts to release the goose on Monday near Scout Island and again on Tuesday, but each time she put it down it walked or flew back to her.
“Today when I was leaving for work, Goose ran down in her cage to me, wanting to go for a car ride,” Burton said from her home on Wednesday.
Initially Bob Harrison, who lives on Duncan Road along the lake, contacted Burton because his dog, Parker, discovered the injured goose hiding under a bush across the road from his home.
“I phoned about three different outfits and nobody wanted to deal with a goose until these fine ladies showed up and Sue said she’d take it,” Harrison told the Tribune on Monday when Burton and her sister Linda Burton arrived to release the goose back into its natural surroundings.
Burton took the goose to Dr. Doug Magnowski at the Animal Care Hospital of Williams Lake.
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“They took her in, checked her out, put her on medication and told me what to do,” Burton said. “She’s fine now, she is still favouring her leg a little bit, but I don’t want to leave her out of the wild too long.”
As Harrison’s dog and the goose reacquainted themselves with each other, Harrison said they seemed to be getting along.
“You got to go in the water,” he told the goose. “Your buddies are in there, honk, honk.”
There is a good-sized drop from Harrison’s yard to the lake, but he said the geese normally fly up to his neighbour’s yard and then walk through to his.
“There’s maybe not enough room here for them to land,” he said. “She must have hit something to injure herself. She could have hit the power lines because they fly over those too. Or maybe she got hit by a car even because when they come up on the road they are prone to getting hit.”
Burton is now going to pursue taking the goose to the Vancouver Game Farm in Abbotsford.
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