Coevorden in Drenthe is one of those places in the Netherlands where they have the goose march (I’ve posted videos of this before). There is also a statue of a woman who sold geese (they were marched to boats and then taken to England, probably round here, as the East Anglian geese were similarly marched to London where the rich Londoners ate them at Christmas). Of course some of the smarter geese might have worked out what often happens to a goose around Christmas, and escaped. So there are many wild geese across Drenthe, and a lot at Coevorden.
Unfortunately in the summer they started building some new estates/office blocks there, the building work disrupted their habitat, and the Council did not want to spend money finding a place for them. Trizin and his friends from the Ganzenparadijs went there and tried to get then to move to a nearby canal but the geese ended up all swimming further, taking an 80km route – some of it is similar to where the cyclists in the song “Op Fietse” by “Skik” rode, although not crossing the German border (also a smart route as the Germans would probably have just got out their shotguns and rifles and made room in the freezer, thinking “we can save €60 for Christmas dinner”).
in any case the canals go back into Drenthe and then across to Groningen. Unfortunately (as this is a very long journey for a goose) some just keeled over from exhaustion, and others flew near to the snelweg (fast roads, there are a few in that area) and were knocked down by cars 🙁
In September, Trizin decided to catch the remaining geese and take them back in his customised dierenambulance (it has a trailer for recovering large numbers of birds) and they have now joined the rest at the Ganzenparadijs 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKJe1feVU5I
original link here (in Dutch)
Akka’s Ganzenparadijs Boeddhistisch Vogelopvangcentrum – Nieuws uit het Ganzenparadijs!
