Oh, how I love the sweet winters of England. I come here every year for their gentleness, kindness and welcome. When the wind comes whistling straight from the Urals to my beloved Norfolk marshes, I never complain. I just think how much worse it is back home in Greenland.
Monday
As ever the day began with a group of us pink-feet yodelling across the sky. We move from nightlands to daylands: from the marshes to fields of endless fodder. Numbers vary from day to day: this morning we were 2,000 strong making V and W formations and long slashes and longer back slashes against the low dark clouds. A great poet said that we’re a kind of living calligraphy: I like to think that one day we’ll spell out a full haiku in Japanese characters.
Tuesday
My wife and I raised three chicks last summer on the glacial cliffs; a bastard Arctic fox got the fourth. They flew with us back to England and they come with us on our daily commute: by now they’re almost as good as us when it comes to drafting. That’s riding in the slipstream of the bird in front: like human cyclists in the Tour de France, but in three dimensions: use only half as much energy as you do facing the wind alone.
Wednesday
That’s why we yodel: it’s pink-foot talk for “keep the formation tight” and “take your bloody turn at the front”. Not such a big deal on a short journey to the fields, but essential on an ocean crossing. Listen out for us: here we come – you won’t see anything more dramatic all winter.
Thursday
We were on a great field today. Sugar beet. After harvest. the field will be good for 30 days, if the farmer doesn’t plough it in. Here, we feed on leaves, stalks and roots of sugar beet, along with any associated plants that humans foolishly call weeds. We’re good news for the farmers: reducing the chances of ploughing disease back into the soil while adding a generous dollop of fertiliser every hour or so.
Friday
How good it is be part of a sky full of pink-feet and to think how mnay more of us there are than 50 years ago. About 10 times more. Bastard shooters still have a pop at us often enough but they’re not allowed to sell our corpses: so no more commercial slaughter. And those sugar beet fields are glorious. Our fitness is the result of the human craze for obesity.
Saturday
We’ll stay till the spring. By then the young ones will be making their own way, but my wife and I will stick together into spring for another brood. The faithfulness of geese is widely admired: but I still remember a jolly moment with that lovely goose from further along the glacier. Ah, well. What do you expect? As the old saying has it, geese are only human.
A pink-footed goose’s CV
Lifespan Eight years
Eating habits Sugar sugar!
Hobbies Formation flying
Sexual preferences My partner, of course. Well, usually.
*As told to Simon Barnes
Photograph by Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty