The warm weather in Gävle is melting all the beautiful snow đ Still hoping for a white Christmas. pic.twitter.com/mmiR8RKIw7
— Gävlebocken (@Gavlebocken) December 17, 2023
Every year at the beginning of December, the town of Gävle, Sweden, erects a giant goat made of straw (Gävlebocken) for Christmas. And every year, we wonder whether the goat will survive until New Year's Day. The Gävle Goat (previously at Neatorama) gets burned to the ground more often than not, despite a fence, security guards, and a 24-hour live webcam. Arsonists face heavy fines and/or jail time if caught. But this year, the goat is in danger from a completely different enemy- nature.
An unusually wet summer in Sweden led to the production of straw that has more grain still attached. Jackdaws have discovered this food source, and have been flocking to the goat to pick apart the straw to reach the grain. There's not much the goat committee can do about it, apart from replacing the goat, and they've decided to let it stand. Note the thinning horns in the image above. You can see the gathering number of jackdaws in this video clip. Only time will tell if the goat falls apart before Christmas, but all agree that a goat collapsing due to hungry birds is better than a goat destroyed in a flaming conflagration.
A timeline of the Gävle Goat's fate from its first incarnation in 1966 shows how many times it was destroyed before January and the method of its downfall. This year's Gävle Goat can be seen anytime via the live webcam. -via Metafilter
Solid disagreement from me on that front. I not only enjoy the calm, tranquil scene of the goat in a blazing, hellish inferno, I also like hearing of the inventive ways in which straw goat met its untimely, yet toasty, demise. Burn baa-a-a-a-by, burn. The "baa-a-a-a" was a goat noise btw.