When lockdown hit, Norfolk naturalist Nick Acheson, who once travelled the world to share his love of wildlife, set off on his mum’s bicycle to find geese
As our skies emptied of human traffic with flights grounded around the world, tens of thousands of geese still swirled and clamoured over Norfolk
Naturalist and conservationist Nick Acheson has been watching Norfolk’s geese from childhood. As the pandemic rolled across the world he found himself alone with little work and close family vulnerable and isolating.
So he borrowed his mum’s old red bicycle and pedalled through winter lockdowns from his home in the upper Wensum valley, following huge flocks of geese across north west Norfolk.
For seven months he kept a diary of his sightings, and the stories he came across as he pedalled 1,200 miles following the flocks of winter geese. By chance it is the exact distance that pinkfeet geese travel as they fly in from Iceland each autumn to roost on our seashore or feast in our food-rich fields.
Engulfed by a mysterious world of thousand-mile migrations and lifelong pairings, Nick sometimes spent hours scanning a flock of thousands of geese feeding in a single field, or via a network of naturalists worldwide, traced individual tagged-and-recorded birds across international borders.
He studied their calls and migration routes, their family groups and feeding patterns, and knows the subtle differences in size and markings which separate brant from brent and pinkfeet from greylag.
Many types of geese can be seen in Norfolk including 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 his quest was not a triumphant twitcher tick-list of sightings, or a quirky travelogue; it is a way of deciphering what is happening in the natural world, a cry of anguish at what the future might hold and a love letter to the Norfolk landscape.
Blessed with a poet’s way with words, crossed with a scientist’s rigorous pursuit of knowledge, Nick 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.
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Nick 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.
Unable to travel far, even if he had wanted to, he followed flights of geese, by bicycle.
One day he spotted unusual Todd's Canada and snow geese within a flock of 20,000 birds near 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. Nick will be talking about it at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust centre in Cley on March 2.
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