Winter Geese

 Monday January 8

Geese used not to be among my favourite birds. Growing up in the welsh valleys of southern Breconshire (now the ancient princedom of Powys), the only geese were of the waddling, hissing variety, which necessitated frantic pedalling so that I could lift my legs above the pedals as I freewheeled through their menacing beaks on the canal towpath.

Moving to Norfolk changed my mind. Autumn flocks of incoming Pinkfeet pass over our garden, never silent, always communicating with their fellow travellers. The first flocks are always heralded by a delighted Pam, rushing outside to gaze at their passing. They really are a favourite of hers. 

Norfolk in winter is a goosefest. Pink-footed at Holham and Winterton, Brent along the coast, White-fronted at Buckenham and Holkham.Always with the possibility of an alien co-traveller. Many an hour have I spent, eyes streaming, frosty fingers on the scope, scanning through feeding flocks looking for those aliens. Red-breasted the real prize, Barnacle (not the feral flocks), Bean and Tundra Bean and Snow Goose. Watching from the car is marginally warmer - but not a lot

I recently read a book by Stephen Rutt 'Wintering, a Season with Geese', where he quoted a writing by Aldo Leopold.

''In the beginning was the unity of the ice sheet. Then followed the unity of the March thaw, and the northward begira of the international geese. Every march since the Pleistocene, the geese have honked unity from China Sea to Siberian Steppe, from Euphrates to Volga,From Nile to Murmansk, from Lincolnshireto Spitzbergen.....By this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic Tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands between.And in the annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as anet profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of march.'' 

Substitute Spitzbergen and Greenland, Arctic Russia and the countries between and there you have a picture of the path 'our' geese fly. The result of a diet of the beet ops and seeds of Norfolk spread across the northern lands.

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