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

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He is never happier than when reading Shakespeare or listening to Bach in his garden, embraced by the happy hum of wool carder bees and Willughby's leafcutters. To honor the geese's great athletic migrations, Nick kept a diary of his sightings as well as the stories he discovered through the community of people, past and present, who loved them too.

His passion for the wild geese of Norfolk and the people that share their spaces shines through each page. Nick has through his knowledge, passion and detailed descriptions put a winter visit firmly back onto the agenda. At the risk of reviewing the book I wanted to read rather than the book it is; The Meaning of Geese is billed on the cover as a personal account, but I felt no closer to the author by the final chapter than I had at the start. I would have welcomed more autobiographical material, and Wintering by Stephen Rutt seems the more suitable geese book for laymen.The pandemic gave Acheson fallow time to mount his rickety bike and scope Norfolk for the “thousands of lives brought here by wind, genes, instinct and the planet’s axial tilt”. This diary of that time is quite beautiful in its detail of the pink-foot, brent and snow geese he watches from the edge of fields.

He helped coordinate Wetlands International's twice-yearly Latin American wetland bird census, ringed thousands of birds on their migration through Bolivia, and was part of a pioneering project to ring James's flamingos at their breeding site in the High Andes. He was a wildlife guide in South America and Africa for more than a decade before, waking up to the enormity of the climate crisis, he vowed never to fly again.It is a quiet book that celebrates these winter visitors and, at the same time, reveals something of the author and his approach to watching nature. For several years he has hosted events discussing conservation, nature writing and the environment at Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserves. This was indeed to be a low-carbon initiative, undertaken on his mother’s 40-year-old red bicycle and spanning September 2021 to the start of the following spring.

Nick has written widely on the natural world and our relationship with it, both in Spanish during his life in South America and in English. The community includes some who watch the birds for recreation and others for whom this is a professional (ecological) relationship; then there are the landowners and tenant farmers who host the vast flocks, and the wildfowlers who take sport from them.Nick is proud to be an ambassador for Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Pensthorpe, a trustee of Pensthorpe Conservation Trust, a member of the steering group of New Networks for Nature, a patron of Felbeck Trust, and a recent president of Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society.

That much is apparent in The Meaning of Geese, a charming account of a winter’s attritional goose-watching in north Norfolk. Above all, it is the story of Nick Acheson’s love for the land in which he was born and raised, and for the wild geese that fill it with sound and spectacle every winter. This resonance is particularly strong for those birdwatchers, and others, who are rooted within the landscapes touched by these birds on their long migratory journeys. In their flocks, Nick encountered rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese, and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother's copy of Peter Scott's field guide as a child.In their flocks, Nick encountered rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother’s copy of Peter Scott’s field guide as a child. Mostly I read a hardback library book and got lost in his descriptions of geese, the people from his life and his story. Nick has written for BBC Wildlife, British Birds, British Wildlife, The Guardian, The Big Issue, BTO News, The Countryman and numerous other publications. In the preparation of his first book he cycled 1,200 miles on his mother's forty-two-year-old bicycle. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.