TALES FROM THE BUSH
Follow the flock
Cycling in search of a special Arctic wanderer
Some birds are more than birds. Glitches in the thread of time, they’re portals to past chapters of our lives. One with such a hold on me is a vagrant Arctic goose.
I first saw a Todd’s Canada goose in Norfolk, back in 2016. Unlike Britain’s introduced Canada geese – disdained for thuggery around town ponds – Todd’s Canada geese are true wild birds. A mere handful of these tundra wanderers reach our shores each winter, carried in migrant flocks of pink-footed geese from Greenland. Growing up in Norfolk, the clamour of wild geese was always in my ears; and I have seen most goose species in our winter flocks. But Todd’s Canada geese – slimnecked, demure and honey-chested – have come to mean the most.
I saw a Todd’s Canada goose again, five years ago, and afterwards went to view an exquisite watercolour of it, taking with me the dearest friend I’ve ever known. She was terminally ill and we spent her last two years hurtling around North Norfolk together, sharing the wild places that we loved, and laughing riotously every time she misidentified the duck and geese species I had been trying to teach her. She loved the painting, too, and insisted that I buy it.
When she died the following year, just as winter’s geese returned, she left a haunting silence in my flock – and a thousand memories captured in a painting of an Arctic goose.
So, when I recently heard that another Todd’s Canada goose had appeared among winter’s pink-footed geese, I knew I had to see it. I took to Norfolk’s muddy roads on my 40-year-old red bicycle and cycled more than 1,000km, week after week, through wind and sleet, sifting with binoculars and scope through countless thousands of geese as they fed in sugar beet fields. Their shrill Norse voices called me on through bitter days and were my tired limbs’ lullaby by night.
At last, my binoculars fell on the curved black neck and sharp white cheek of the Todd’s, among a seething flock of 20,000 geese. As I watched, my dear friend’s love came pouring back, warming my chest against winter’s unremitting cold. I whispered that she is not forgotten; that this rare wild goose has brought her back to me. I found that I was crying. But told myself it was the gnawing wind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Acheson is a conservationist and natural history writer. His book The Meaning of Geese: A Thousand Miles in Search of Home (Chelsea Green Publishing, £18.99) is out now.
Have a wild tale to tell? Email a brief synopsis to catherine.smalley@ourmedia.co.uk