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Lili Phetteplace spotted a goose sitting on eggs on a floating nest island in Washington Park last week.

The 11-year-old nature lover has visited the nest every day since. She was there Wednesday evening in a rain shower, and back again at 6 the next morning.

“I wanted to see them hatch, because I’ve never seen eggs hatch in real life,” she said.

Lili , mostly because of the poop that litters grass and paths in the park, but she’s not among them. In this way, she’s just like those adults at the Park Lane condos across from Washington Park, where for the second year in a row, a goose has been allowed to nest in a flower pot.

“They hatched one day, and the next they were ready to jump out,” said Linda Dahl. “We had a ramp they climbed up.”

They then escorted the goslings across the street and into the park, where they now trail their parents around.

In the first 10 weeks, before goslings learn to fly, their parents are fiercely defensive, and Lili has experienced this firsthand.

“Once some goslings and their mama were walking toward me, and the mama started hissing at me because I was coming their way,” said Lili.

Her inquisitive nature has sometimes made her get too close, and once she was bitten.

But right now her biggest worry is the nest.

When the island floated very close to the shore one day, she stepped onto the rocky border to lean in and count the eggs. There were 10. Now, she thinks there are about eight.

The parents don’t seem to be around. She yearns to touch the eggs to see if they’re cold or warm, but then worried that a human touch would make the parents abandon the nest. “It’s a lose-lose situation.”

This is a girl who knows a lot about geese. She says they mate for life, that nesting season is mid-March to May, and that it takes 28 to 30 days for goslings to emerge from the eggs.

She describes herself as “loquacious and tenacious.” That tenacity led her to pester her mother to rent them a boat on the lake so they can paddle closer to see the nest, or to go home and fetch Dad’s kayak for the job.

“She’s very protective in general with animals,” says Angie Phetteplace. “She’s like a little activist. She wants to change the world and will tell everyone what she thinks and why she thinks they’re wrong.”

Her friend Natalie says Lili once told someone feeding the geese a hotdog to knock it off, because they are herbivores, not omnivores.

Lili knows about predators, and that turtles were seen basking in the sun near the nest one day.

A fisherman who says he knows Smith Lake like the inside of his tackle box says he has seen turtles chewing on goose eggs.

But Denver city naturalist Kelly Uhing is doubtful. “Goslings do fall prey to certain species of turtles, and it’s no fun to watch,” she said. “But as far as them eating eggs, I’m not sure.”

Most turtles in Washington Park are ” said Uhing, that are bought in pet stores and released when people don’t want them anymore.

They like to hide underneath the floating islands, put in the lake about two years ago to provide a safe nesting spot for more than 20 species of birds that frequent the park, from kingfishers to red-winged blackbirds.

They’ve also proved popular with the Canada geese, whose population in the central U.S. soared from a few thousand in 1965 to more than 1 million today.

to do it,” Uhing says.

So, in a way, Lili is watching for a miracle — an egg or two that didn’t get oiled, or an entire clutch that escaped detection.

“Look, she’s sitting on them,” she told Natalie on Wednesday afternoon. “I bet she pushed out the dead ones, then stayed on the live ones. I really want to get on one of those boats and go over to get a closer view of what she’s doing.”

Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com