How smart are geese?

Answer 1

This is quite a difficult question to answer. In general, they are extremely intelligent waterfowls, probably more intelligent than ducks. However, you should never compare any bird to a human being. They learn very quickly like most swans and loons and whatever they learn varies depending on the environment that they are raised in. Each individual's intelligence varies but is also largely related towards their relationships with other geese or with the humans that they're familliar with. Relations with other Waterfowls:Geese are social animals and professional observational learners from gosling stages. They observe their parents' movements, reaction to stimuli, and eat whatever they see their parents or other adults of their kind eat and some may watch another adult catch a tiny minnow or insect and attempt it on their own later. As they mature into adulthood, they also learn how to be aggressive to strangers. Geese can also communicate with ducks and swans despite a mild oral language barrier between the three different species and some even learn from each other. They often share the same territories and can coexist with them peacefully. Relation with humans:Most geese read and understand our body languages better than our vocal languages. This ties in a lot with their intelligences because most geese who grow up around humans and are exposed to friendly people everyday learn to understand and recognize us better than those who have never been around humans much and are usually aggressive around us.Geese , primarily the Canada Geese, are normally afraid of humans. Relations between humans and waterfowls are usually met frictions. While it's possible for a human to befriend a goose, to actually bond with these animals is tougher for humans due to the major language barriers between the wild geese and the humans as well as our behaviours towards them. Goslings are normally curious around humans while the parents are usually fearful and would much rather stay as far away from us as possible. The fathers are usually the first to attack if any human get close to the goslings by about two meters. However, if a person has lots of patience around the parents and refrains from touching the goslings during the nursing season then the parents, depending on their personality may pull some strings and allow that familliar person to hang around their turf which in addition gives both the human and the goslings an opportunity to get to know each other. Goslings are very quick at learning to distinguish between people they trust and people they should stay away from and may even learn to bond with the visiting human if they encounter him or her very often. And you don't need food to build a relationship with them. This is also where the interesting part comes in, if a 5-year-old person bonds with a gosling and then parts way with it during the migration season, the adult goose will still recognize that person at age 10 or over even after so many years. Geese have a very good memory of who they trust and are quite capable of recognizing humans apart while we humans have trouble recognizing our goose friend from the other stranger geese after a long absences from each other.