The team

The DümmerGänse

Leno - is the leader and, at the evening weigh-in, the biggest and heaviest of the troop. At the same time, though, she is more cautious and watchful than the others. Her fear of everything new made her, as a little gosling, plop into the water the most inelegantly of all, crooked and flailing. And if she spots a little white piece of paper on the path, her stubborn refusal to walk on borders on that of a mule. She is the one who always wants to be closest to us and to sleep pressed tight against our legs.

Julchen - is the smallest of the three, and although at times she weighs only half as much as Fussel, she has fought her way to the middle position in the pecking order. She gets tired the quickest and is also the one who wants to go on crawling into our trouser legs to sleep the longest (although she is far too big for it). She is very fussy about her menu, but when it comes to new things she is the bravest. She takes off straight and sure, and looks the most elegant when she jumps out of the stable door or lands on the water at the harbour.

Fussel - is at the very bottom of the pecking order and wastes no time when he sees a titbit. Quick, down it goes, before Leno or Julchen can see it! He loves to eat, and at length, and is always the first to try out new things to eat. Sometimes he eats so busily that he does not notice the troop has moved on. All of a sudden he gabbles in alarm and comes chasing after us, wings flapping. When the other two are busy he likes to sneak up and try to steal our pens. He is especially fond of pencils, which he can chew on until they crumble.

The foster parents

juli - studied design and accompanies the DümmerGänse as the project’s artist. That means the camera comes along on every outing, even if it has to be carried through Lake Dümmer swimming, balanced on her head. And her drawing things are never left out of the waterproof rucksack. The three study subjects like to inspect those closely too, with the result that not a page of the sketchbook stays unnibbled.

Having grown up in the country herself, she does not mind the rain, and mosquitoes are fought off with insect repellent. The few hours of sleep are harder on her, and so is the sweltering summer heat, when the only escape is the insect-crawling shade of the reeds or the foul-smelling waters of Lake Dümmer...

The fact that she has never raised precocial birds herself does not seem to bother the DümmerGänse. She is accepted without question, and all three love to tug at her hair, clamber all over her and poke their beaks into her collar.

Olly - is a lawyer specialising in IT law and managing partner of net&rights GmbH.

Even as a child he builds his own incubators and raises young birds by hand. Among them a carrion crow, which is fed during school lessons too.

He had his first experience of imprinting precocial birds at the age of 15, when he hatched and raised two chickens during the Easter holidays. The grown chickens provoke mixed reactions in the middle of Cologne: some of the neighbours cannot warm to the rooster, who punctually announces the break of dawn in summer. Others are pleased about the eggs from the free-range hens.

So he brings most of the know-how and the specialist reading to the project, including, of course, the books by Konrad Lorenz. Permanently equipped with his binoculars, not even the smallest bird escapes him, and it is followed until it has been correctly identified and entered in the bird book.

As the technically skilled member of the DümmerGänse he actually manages to conjure up the internet in the middle of the wilderness, and so impresses many a sedge warbler that has surely never seen a laptop in the reeds before.