Last year, K discovered something amazing: White Rock Lake’s mute swan, Katie, aka Lady Katherine, was mating with a goose called Patches. Willingly mating. Happily mating. In fact, Lady Katherine was usually the aggressor.
K was horrified that a swan would fuck a goose. She ended up deleting the pics she took of Lady Katherine and Patches mating because she was so grossed out. Luckily, I had witnessed a couple of their sexual encounters from last year and got some pics to document that it happened.
I wondered if they would rekindle their relationship this year. While Patches and Lady Katherine were getting it on last year, Patches was mated to a female goose called Annie with whom he socialized and had sexual encounters. Annie and Patches are still together.
Apologies for the blurriness in the thumbnails; goddamned WordPress is STILL compressing and framing my pictures strangely, despite some changes Q made.
Annie (left) and Patches (right) drinking together from a puddle on January 23, 2015.
THE OTHER WOMAN.
On January 13, I was hanging out with Mister Mary Mack by the shore at Sunset Bay. It was cold outside—I’m not sure if the temperature even got to 40. Throughout the afternoon I watched the pelicans fly in and swim to the marshy spit where they loaf on cold days. When there were lulls in the pelican action, I watched the geese. Cutie Pie, the Ross’s goose that joined the goose flock at White Rock Lake, climbed out of the water and preened, and Lady Katherine waddled into the water and swam away.
Cutie Pie is so adorable.
Oh! She’s itchy, too!
When the pelicans loaf on the marshy spit, which is small and narrow, established pelicans often gape and snap at newcomers who have to step through a dense crowd of sleeping and preening pelicans to find a spot for themselves.
After weeks of wandering through the jungle, I happened upon a clearing where I saw the strangest sights . . .
I peered far out into the water.
Yep, that’s a swan with a goose on top of her. And she’s not giving him a piggyback ride.
Settle back, readers, and prepare to bask in the wonders of interspecies copulation. This is HARDCORE birdie action.
Lady Katherine and Patches started mating last year in late winter. At one point in time K saw them mating almost daily. I recorded two instances of their coupling in two days in late March of 2014.
Here Lady Katherine and Patches are engaged in courtship and pre-copulatory displays, respectively. Later incidents from this year are better documented in regard to their flirting.
Lady Katherine plays hard-to-get, surging forward as Patches attempts to mount her.
Jesus, where the fuck do you focus when this is what you’re seeing?
Well, he’s at least a little closer to, er, sealing the deal.
Is Patches successfully penetrating Lady Katherine? I’m not sure. Sometimes it does not appear to be so, but that’s not surprising; I doubt any bird achieves success every time that sex is attempted. Patches does seem to know that he has to back up much further than he would with another goose, but as you can see in the last pic, he has to negotiate around Lady Katherine’s large tail, which makes the situation more difficult. I have witnessed Lady Katherine engaging in some post-copulatory displays, and I definitely have witnessed Patches in such displays, but I don’t know if geese or swans display after successful copulation or if they do so even after attempted but unsuccessful copulation. A couple of times I saw Patches’s pseudopenis still extended after he disengaged from Lady Katherine, but again, I don’t know whether that means penetration was successful or if he had been preparing for penetration but did not succeed. I don’t remember if Patches displayed after either of the attempts I recorded last year, but I do remember that once Patches dismounted after this attempt, he chomped Lady Katherine’s neck.
They were back at it the next day.
Annie, suspicious of Patches’s claim that he and Lady Katherine were just “going for a swim,” decided to follow them.
All aboard the S.S. EWWWWWWW!
Patches? What the fuck are you doing?!
Sadly for Annie, Patches was not yet ready to leave.
The mating sequences from 2015 will be displayed after the cut.