The Meaning of Geese: A Thousand Miles in Search of Home

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Red Sixty Seven. He has an essay in Low Carbon Birding published by Pelagic, which was chosen as British Birds Best Bird Book of the Year 2022. There are several interesting themes running through the book - the impact of climate change, hunting, geese in the creative imagination, conservation - but the diary format prevents these from being developed. The world is a jigsaw of understanding,” says Acheson. “You need the first pieces put there for you to start seeing a pattern, and he gave us those pieces. What lives in this landscape? What noise does it make? Where does it come from? He peopled the landscape with what belongs there in an osmotic way. It was so gentle.” Ten years later he came home from this three-month stint, having worked in nature conservation and sustainable development the length and breadth of Bolivia, across South America, and in Australia and India.

Acheson grew up here, in a village called Little Snoring. As a boy, he was obsessed with wild animals and inspired to love geese by a teacher, Dave Horsley, who led his school’s bird club. Lots of us birders have talked about our move towards staying local or travelling by land or not twitching.” Twitching – rushing to photograph whatever rare bird flits into Britain – seems to be a dirty word. “No it isn’t,” says Acheson, “because I respect that for some people that’s a way of appreciating nature. For me, I’d rather have a relationship with a place and the things that live in it.” He didn’t set out to write a book – “I thought, how am I going to get through this winter? I will write a story about the geese” – but his journal has become The Meaning of Geese, a gorgeously observed paean to the beauty and complexity of these birds, and the landscape of North Norfolk. Through paying close attention to wild nature, Acheson, like so many of us, has found solace during difficult times. These geese make him feel small and he revels in it. “The smaller I can feel, the better it is. And that’s not a self-obliterating feeling, it’s a feeling of wanting to know my place, because genetically, the carbon, the genes, everything that makes me and you and us is part of this enormous flow, and these geese are a sacrament of that.” He then explains how during COVID he decided to follow Norfolk’s geese on his bike over the 2020-2021 winter. The resulting diary of his trips and observations is what we read.The book opens with an excellent prologue – about the “edgeless place, of land and sea and sky all seeping into one another” which is the Coast of Norfolk - which includes evocative paragraphs on each of: The Wash; the Saltmarshes from Holme to Kelling and around Breydon Water; the Dunes – including the shingle at Cley and Salthouse; Norfolk’s “northeast shoulder” from Weybourne to Happisburgh; the Broads; and finally the Grazing Marsh near the north Coast (typically reclaimed from the sea) and the Broads. It then gives an overview of the main Winter Geese that visit these regions and explains how the author, admirably, gave up a prestigious career doing global eco-tours due to their Carbon footprint and returned to his birth area of North Norfolk to work in conservation. In the UK he has worked on a huge range of projects for Norfolk Wildlife Trust, The Wildlife Trusts, Pensthorpe and others.