It’s the ‘backend’ and the geese have been arriving for weeks now. They are seeking out our balmy southern climes for their winter break. The first time their honking calls draw your eyes skywards to their ragged V formations is a punctuation mark in the seasons. Have they just come in from Iceland off the North Sea or are they on their new daily commute from shore to field? Flying at 24,000 feet must have its problems with oxygen supply, but the cold air at passenger jet altitude helps cool their labouring flight muscles.
Before the turkey arrived from the New World and took over Christmas we ate geese – and before that we presumably ate wild geese. Their arrival must have been a winter bounty to our ancestors. Latterly years of ‘sporting’ slaughter diminished their numbers to perilous levels. The mechanic on our farm was a fisherman and a shooter. He took great delight in informing me that, as a young man, Sir Peter Scott used to shoot over the Solway marshes. Conservation efforts have resulted in a recovery in goose numbers and the grumbling has begun from other land-users. In places like Islay there is now a huge biomass of birds to sustain. Geese are grazing animals and get through large quantities of grass, but the necessity to rise instantly should a predator appear means they cannot afford the luxury of a heavy, efficient digestive tract. Instead they rapidly extract the most accessible nutrients before the rest is somewhat wastefully discarded back onto the field. Culling of barnacle and white-fronted geese occurs on Islay. In fact a large chunk of Islay is owned by the RSPB who manage most of their land for the benefit of the geese.
Scotland’s meagre population of red-billed chough are resident on Islay all year round and are only just clinging on at about 50 pairs. The RSPB keep grazing livestock to encourage them. Throughout the year the chough depend on foraging for invertebrates among the sheep droppings and cowpats. The first chough I ever saw was on Islay with my artist friend Jim Dalziel. The aerial acrobatics and ‘keeyah’ calls among the sand dunes were magical and I treasure the watercolour he did of them. More recently, as if the lack of food and habitat wasn’t bad enough, these birds have developed a form of congenital blindness due to their limited genetic diversity. It’s a recessive gene which is lethal to the affected nestlings.
Here, on the east side of the country, you can stand on the shore at Aberlady Bay and see squadrons of pink-footed geese coming in. It is genuinely one of the great wildlife spectacles. Numbers in that roost peak at about 30,000 before the birds disperse inland. At the other end of winter their noisy departure lifts the spirits with the promise of lengthening days and eventually some warmth.
Other bird species have also suffered a crash in numbers – but for more mysterious reasons. Starlings, song thrushes, house sparrows and latterly greenfinches have all had problems. When we first moved into our house 28 years ago there was a cheerful colony of house sparrows hanging around the back garden. They were always there and reminded me of being at home on the farm – but then, quite suddenly, they were gone. It gave me a thrill this year to see sparrows return to the garden for the first time in 25 years. It was actually more enjoyable to me than my recent garden life-tick of a nuthatch; an inevitable addition to the list as this interesting bird continues its astonishing northerly advance.
Sadly, there is little sign of a recovery in the greenfinch numbers. Trichomoniasis, allegedly from dirty bird feeders, has done for them. I always notice the occasional nasal ‘zwee’ call these days because it was once so familiar but is now so uncommon. Assuming the usual malign human influences don’t underlie these avian malthusian problems, the recent population fluctuations must be the result of some kind of bird plague. In which case, there’s a grim irony to the autumn arrival of all these healthy birds who find us wandering about below them in our masks, assiduously avoiding any close formation.
The Bohemian Waxwing 