#99: The sound of autumn in Norfolk

They are back. I passed some in the fields near to Docking at the end of last week, and heard them for the first time near to Holme next the Sea. 

Pink-footed Goose
Anser brachyrhynchus

The pink-footed geese are back in Norfolk from their migration. Their noise is part of the atmosphere of autumn and when I lived in Snettisham for twelve years I would frequently stand outside my house staring up as skein after skein headed back out to the marshes for the night before coming inland to graze in the local fields. The numbers have been impacted by changes in farming methods, particularly with regards to the cropping of sugar beet.

Feathers via Featherbase.

The geese are juse one of the species mentioned in Nick Acheson's excellent book on geese in Norfolk.

The Meaning of Geese is the story of Nick Acheson's love for the land in which he was born and raised and for the wild geese that fill it with sound and spectacle every winter. During a time when many of us faced the prospect of little work or human contact, renowned naturalist Nick Acheson found a sense of peace and purpose in his pursuit of the wild geese that filled the Norfolk skies on their seasonal visits from Iceland and Siberia.

In The Meaning of Geese Nick recounts these adventures, starting with the dramatic arrival of the pinkfeet and brent geese as they land in the thousands in Britain each autumn. Over seven months he cycles 1,200 miles - the exact length of the pinkfeet's migration to Iceland, while encountering rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother's copy of Peter Scott's field guide as a child. Nick keeps a diary of his sightings as well as the stories he discovers through the community of people, past and present, who love the geese and are working to protect their future.

Top image: Pink-footed geese over Snettisham, Norfolk - Winter 2009 - by Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license

Update October 2023

Read Nick's piece in the latest Big Issue. A warning to us ...