Low-angled sunlight had turned the leaves of birch and beech golden, but hauntingly so, the richness elegiac. The message seemed to be: enjoy this because it’s at an end. Except it felt preternaturally warm for this time of year, prompting a familiar discussion about different responses to the state of the natural world.
Just then we heard the melancholy honking of some Canada geese overhead, the birds concealed by the canopy of trees. I moved to where I could see them: two V-formations comprising perhaps three dozen birds heading north. They were low enough to see the slight inflexion of their necks as their shoulders strained at each wingbeat and close enough to hear each bird’s call, the females answering the lower-pitched males.
Many birders are dismissive of these longstanding incomers. The academic literature on Canada geese in Britain often focuses on the problems they cause – to pasture and crops, municipal ponds and even aircraft. If they get too troublesome, the law allows their killing. But the soft way in which the different birds called to each other as they heaved themselves through the air seemed like consolation in a threatening world.
As a young man, spending a year in Quebec, I would stand on my porch in the early dawn and watch transfixed as thousands of Canada geese flew north for the summer. Their British cousins have no need to migrate. These ones were simply going somewhere new to feed.
But watching them overhead, I wondered what might be happening in their brains. Was there something atavistic at work? Some almost lost instinct for setting out on epic journeys stirring in them? In North America, some Canada geese have also been settling permanently in their wintering grounds, a lack of predators and an abundance of food among the reasons. We seem to be giving them an easier option. Perhaps that’s where the antipathy comes from; perhaps we don’t want our geese to put their feet up in the local park. Maybe we need them setting out for new horizons, to show us the way.
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