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

Product Information

To honour 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.

Chelsea Green Publishing is a 100% employee-owned leading publisher of books on the politics and practice of sustainable living. During a time when many people faced the prospect of little work or human contact, Nick followed the pinkfeet and brent geese that filled the Norfolk skies and landscape as they flew in from Iceland and Siberia. Having worked in the wild landscapes and seascapes of every continent, Nick has huge experience of their biodiversity. While mainly fact and information focused there are some beautifully written lines throughout this and it’s a book that’s easy to read through in just a couple of sittings. Equally evident from the text is Nick’s depth of knowledge, of the geese and the other wildlife portrayed in this book, but also of the landscape in which he was born and raised.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. I saw Nick chairing a discussion at the Gathering Festival at Wild Ken Hill last year, and when I saw he had his first book coming out I was desperate to read it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He is best known in East Anglia where he makes regular appearances on ITV Anglia, BBC Look East and BBC Radio Norfolk, and presents films for Norfolk Wildlife Trust, Green Light Trust and Pensthorpe.

He is a committed campaigner on the environment, living as sustainably as is possible and contributing to a number of environmental initiatives, including Low Carbon Birding. The meaning of migration, it turns out, is more complex and downright epic than our group over-confidently supposed. It is good to be made aware of how interlinked we are across the globe by migration and also by the internet so that geese experts can easily talk to one another. Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas ‘becomes a viewpoint from which we can see the whole world’. By November he has started to think like geese, to feel their overhead chatter vibrate in his chest.Ten years later he came home from this three-month stint, having worked in nature conservation and sustainable development the length and breadth of Bolivia, across South America, and in Australia and India. Birds continue to arrive in the UK from more northerly regions to spend the next few months here in our warmer winters, before. Born and raised in Norfolk, Nick has a life-long love for wildlife and particularly the wild geese that arrive there in their thousands every year.

Pinks” do their summer moulting and breeding in Iceland and Greenland then head a thousand miles south to places likes Holkham, which they use as a coastal base for inland sorties to feed in beet fields – that is, if farmers have left anything for them. He then explains how during COVID he decided to follow Norfolk’s geese on his bike over the 2020-2021 winter. Still, I admire Acheson’s fervour: “I watch birds not to add them to a list of species seen; nor to sneer at birds which are not truly wild. In the UK he has worked on a huge range of projects for Norfolk Wildlife Trust, The Wildlife Trusts, Pensthorpe and others.The company publishes authors who bring in-depth, practical knowledge to life and give readers hands-on information related to organic farming and gardening, ecology and the environment, healthy food, sustainable economics, progressive politics and most recently, integrative health and wellness. I loved this book from the opening pages despite knowing nothing about Norfolk, and not being particularly into geese before reading it. He meticulously details the geese's arrival, observing what they mean to his beloved Norfolk and the role they play in local people's lives—and what role the birds could play in our changing world.

Tundra bean, taiga bean, brent … I don’t think I’ve seen any of these species – not even pinkfeet, to my recollection – so wished for black-and-white drawings or colour photographs in the book. Having studied the arrival and departure of the Brent Geese for almost forty years I purchased this book with high expectations - particularly given the 'rave' reviews. Now he mostly stays close to home in North Norfolk, where he grew up and where generations of his family have lived and farmed, working for Norfolk Wildlife Trust and appreciating the flora and fauna on his doorstep. 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. The Meaning of Geese is the story of how he found purpose in a seven-month, 1,200 mile cycle journey (the exact length of the pink-footed geese’s migration).Next time I'm birdwatching in Norfolk, I'll be looking a little more closely at the various species of geese, and wondering where they've been, and where they're going. I saw Nick Acheson speak at New Networks for Nature 2021 as the ‘anti-’ voice in a debate on ecotourism. The Covid-19 lockdowns spawned a number of nature books in the UK and, although the pandemic is not a major element here, one does get a sense of how Acheson struggled with isolation as well as the normal winter blues and found comfort and purpose in birdwatching.