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

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As the Covid lockdowns started, like so many people, his relationship with nature further changed and as everybody became isolated he explored the countryside looking for and learning about geese. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.

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. For several years he has hosted events discussing conservation, nature writing and the environment at Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserves. I loved this book from the opening pages despite knowing nothing about Norfolk, and not being particularly into geese before reading it.

By the time the geese fly north in spring, he’s pedalled a thousand often wet and miserable miles of his own, all to count and identify the resident flocks and share his findings on the goose web. Nick has through his knowledge, passion and detailed descriptions put a winter visit firmly back onto the agenda. I saw Nick Acheson speak at New Networks for Nature 2021 as the ‘anti-’ voice in a debate on ecotourism. In the lockdown winter of 2020-21, 50,000 came here, and pretty much all of them were accounted for by Nick Acheson.

That much is apparent in The Meaning of Geese, a charming account of a winter’s attritional goose-watching in north Norfolk. Chelsea Green Publishing is a 100% employee-owned leading publisher of books on the politics and practice of sustainable living. You sense that going back to the murky Glasgow of Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, was as much fun for the author as her increasingly broad church of readers.

Since his earliest days he has been enthralled by birds, mammals, insects, plants and other creatures. 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. His journal also has much to say about what mother nature, whose every changing detail he records, can do for a person’s mental wellbeing. 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”. His book is an intimate diary of his sightings and his experiences with the geese-loving communities he met along the way.

Greeted by tuts and sarcastic eye-rolls, he set the bar a little higher and off we went to gawp at feathered friends through binoculars. Framed by living alone during lockdown, the narrative reveals a broader community of goose enthusiasts, drawn together by a fascination for these winter visitors, both common and rare.Birds continue to arrive in the UK from more northerly regions to spend the next few months here in our warmer winters, before. He has spent four years in Asia, many months in both Madagascar and North America, and has swum and snorkelled or watched whales and seabirds in every ocean. Their fluctuations, their vexed taxonomies, the “fractal complexity” of their flocks, their skill at whiffling, in which they perform aeronautical body rolls when coming in to land. Some fellow enthusiasts mentioned in dispatches, good sorts who like him rarely talk of anything else, also photograph or paint geese.

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.

For a number of years he has written columns for the Norfolk Magazine and for Norfolk Wildlife Trust's Tern magazine, of which he is editor. 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.