🪿 Where the Wild Geese Go

Hi 👋

The other evening, I was driving home along a country lane as the sky over the Cornish countryside was washed in warm amber. Suddenly, cutting through the peach tinted clouds were the dark outlines of large birds.

With their necks stretched out and their strong wings beating in time, they flew in their V formation across the sky, holding their line against the wind. I (safely) slowed the car to almost a crawl as I looked upwards through my windscreen, rolling gently underneath. As they passed on, it wasn't long until another group soon followed, again in the same direction. Simple meaningful moments of awe.

It struck me that we often only truly notice geese as they pass overhead, between one place and another. But most of a goose's life happens somewhere we hardly see at all.

For centuries, up to the 1590s, nobody in Britain knew where the Brent goose went to breed. Folk tales of the time told how the birds grew on trees in Scotland, hanging over the water like fruit, dropping when ripe. It sounds strange now, but from their view, the birds simply appeared each winter, with no nest ever found and no egg ever seen, and then just as fast as they arrived, they left.

In June 1596, a Dutch crew sailed north to find a new sea route to Asia and 'discovered' Svalbard far inside the Arctic Circle, as they rowed ashore on a bare island, they saw the geese sitting on their nests. Back home, no one they knew had ever been that far north, so no one could say where the geese bred. All along, the geese had been hatching their young in a place no one had reached.

But geese have another hidden place. Once a year, they drop their flight feathers, all at once. For four to six weeks a goose can't fly at all, so it goes somewhere safe and stays low on the water while new wings grow in. Parents moult while their goslings are still too young to fly, so the whole family sits out those weeks together. It seems that to be made new, the goose goes somewhere hidden and stays grounded for a while.

After learning this about geese, I soon thought of Iceland.

In spring and summer of 2015, I hitchhiked and walked across the country from East to West, alone. It was the coldest June Iceland had seen this century, colder still in the east, which is where I was. My bag was heavier than it really ought to have been, and my clothes weren't warm enough. I slept wild in a tent for two nights running, and by the second morning I'd started to get used to the cold. But the cold never stopped, well, being cold. You just had to keep moving to keep warm and thank god for my portable stove and herbal teas.

I walked the high route from Seyðisfjörður to Bakkagerði, over ground that looked like the moon, odd clumps of grass pushed up through the last of the snow, and waterfalls ran with melt water. It was quiet, very quiet, in a way I hadn't known before. For the first time in my life, I felt truly alone in the world. I felt the awe of smallness, as if I was a solitary daisy amongst a great, diverse, wild rich meadow of existence. The thinness of that place brought me inwards and I felt deeply connected, after all, the word silent is an anagram of listen.

Coming down off the high ground, I walked into a valley where rich lupins grew thick on the sides. There, I found an estuary with birds out on the water, and waders working the mud. Lupins aren't native to Iceland at all, as it happens, they were brought over after the war to hold the eroding soil together, and they've spread across the lowlands ever since. That estuary, that valley, is the kind of place where a good many of the pink-footed geese and greylags that spend their winters in Britain are raised.

I came down out of those hills with something I hadn't had going up: a renewed resolve. Not long after that trip, I started a master's in forestry, and the career I've built since, in sustainability, in land, in this way of noticing and working, it all traces straight back to that walk. I can see how I went up a mountain and then came down to start another.

I still go looking for solitude in wild places when I need it. And I still love, just as much, coming back to people afterwards, just like geese I suppose. They go to the far places, the bare ones, the ones that look empty or cold or lost, to be made and remade. And then they come back.

Here in Cornwall, the Brent geese have returned to the river Fal, all the way from Arctic Siberia, and are now out on the mud at low tide. We've got our own barren ground too, up on the windswept Bodmin Moor, out through the clay country round St Austell, or along the rough edges of the Roseland peninsula. Thin places exist everywhere, you just have to go looking for them, then notice what changed when you come home.

It's in the hidden places, the secret places, where we find a different kind of connection.

Talk soon,

Rob

PS: The Brent geese are currently arriving back on Britain's coasts. The British Trust for Ornithology keeps a page on where they've come from and where you might spot them: https://www.bto.org/learn/about-birds/birdfacts/brent-goose