Lift your eyes to the wide winter skies over north Norfolk at dawn or dusk and the chances are you will see a skein of geese tracing vast v shapes overhead.
Sometimes their numbers swell and there could be thousands swirling, clamouring and swooping down to seashore roosts or food-rich fields.
Naturalist and conservationist Nick Acheson has been watching Norfolk’s geese since he was a child.
He has studied their calls and migration routes, their family groups and feeding patterns, and learned the subtle differences in size and markings which separate brant from brent and pinkfeet from greylag.
As the sky emptied of human traffic in 2020, Nick began following geese around Norfolk, pedalling his mother’s old red bicycle through country lanes from his home in the upper Wensum valley, engulfed by a mysterious world of thousand-mile migrations and lifelong pairings. He spends hours scanning a flock of thousands feeding in a single field, and traces individual tagged-and-recorded birds across international borders.
Many types of geese can be seen in Norfolk, pinkfeet, greylag, tundra bean, taiga bean, barnacle, Canada, white-fronted Russian, brent and brant – and Nick found them all, possibly even including the vanishingly rare grey-bellied brant.
But this quest is not a triumphant twitcher tick-list of sightings, or a quirky travelogue; it is a way of deciphering what is happening in our natural world, a cry of anguish at what the future might hold and a love letter to the Norfolk landscape.
For seven months Nick kept a diary of his sightings, and the stories he came across as he pedalled 1,200 miles following flocks of winter geese across Norfolk. By chance it is the exact distance that pinkfeet geese travel as they fly in from Iceland each autumn.
Blessed with a poet’s way with words, crossed with a scientist’s rigorous pursuit of knowledge, Nick has turned his epic bike ride and bird hunt into an important and beautiful book.
He grew up immersed in the wildlife of north Norfolk and has worked in wildlife and conservation all his life, as a naturalist, tour guide, writer and broadcaster. He is president of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society and an ambassador for the Norfolk Wildlife Trust.
He left Norfolk to study French, then environmental management, at Oxford University. He travelled to Bolivia to study bird migration patterns, planning to stay for three months, but lived there for a decade, mesmerised by jaguar, pink dolphins, and maned wolves. But the bright, boisterous life of the rainforest was coloured with immense sadness as its wildlife retreated.
Although he spread his wings, working in the wild landscapes and seascapes of every continent, and leading tours to see tigers, elephants, and rhinos, he was always as passionate about the avocet, reed bunting, jackdaw, damselfly and otter of Norfolk
Increasingly horrified by the devastation climate change is wreaking he vowed to stop flying, but as he settled back into the familiar, fascinating landscape of his childhood the pandemic hit. He could no longer travel far, even if he had wanted to.
Instead he followed flights of geese, by bicycle across Norfolk and through sightings from fellow naturalists, around the world.
One day he spotted unusual Todd's Canada and snow geese within a flock of 20,000 birds just south of Docking. "The din when they took off was so intense. I spent hours and hours just lost in the drama," he said.
Nick is an enchanting guide and gifted translator of the calls and behaviours of the birds he hears around him, and his first book pulsates with the awe he feels for the geese he sees feeding on familiar fields within a few miles of his home, wheeling above him in a blizzard of thousands of birds, leaving for distant Arctic breeding grounds and eventually returning to Norfolk.
The Meaning of Geese, a thousand miles in search of home, by Nick Acheson, is published by Chelsea Green on February 9. Nick will be talking about it at the Norwich Science Festival on February 11 (as part of Wildlife fieldwork: the grubby and X-rated truth) and at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust centre in Cley on March 2.
