Wild geese
Award- winning writer Stephen Rutt's latest book traces the lives and habits of six of the most common species of goose that winter in the UK. This edited extract features barnacle geese at Caerlaverock, Dumfries
An extract from Stephen Rutt’s new book, Wintering
We are up early for the dawn flight, a special event run by the WWT ( Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust) at Caerlaverock on certain winter weekends. It is a risk – it is always a risk with something as unpredictable as geese. The theory is that we get to the merse before dawn, ready for the geese to awake and leave their roost. It might not happen. They might fly off to a different part of the merse. It might start raining and they might not fly. It might never get light. The gamble is that we subject ourselves to either cold, wet, insufferable boredom, or the spectacle of life waking up with the light.
The car cuts a tunnel of light through the dark roads, headlights illuminating the eyes of deer, falling leaves and a river shining through the roadside field. As we approach the coast the light begins to creep in under the blanket of night. It is 6: 30am. We stand by the weak light of the Caerlaverock visitor centre with a small group of visitors and three wardens. From the marshes around us redshanks shriek, curlews call, and early rising whooper swans bugle through the darkness, freshly arriving with the winter from Iceland. The geese have yet to stir. After a short talk – the obligatory disclaimer about the puddle- strewn state of the ground – we walk off along the avenues. I have never been beyond the last hide. It has always been out of bounds, and it feels odd now, like trespassing, to go beyond the paths of a nature reserve.
Light has been creeping in over the last hour. But when the sun finally breaks over the hill and through the strands of cloud, dawn becomes a rush. We look south and west, along the firth towards the lighthouse of Southerness, watching water and mud appear and grow light, streaked with dark lines of geese. Behind us whooper swans fly on to the marsh, calling always, trumpeting of the north. In Finland the composer, birdwatcher and nature- lover Jean Sibelius wrote in his diary, ‘ Lord God, what beauty!’ after seeing 16 whooper swans. He was not wrong. The birds are beautiful but there is a beauty to what we are doing as well. Standing, waiting: still while nature begins to move around us, the dark relinquishing.
Dawn is here. A thousand barnacle geese take off – flying towards and then veering away from us, flying over the last hide. There is no time to regret that the wardens didn’t take us there instead. After half an hour of standing still in the first light, the birds come as if on the cue of dawn, as if flicked on by a switch of sunlight. Egrets fly past, 14 little and one great white, dispersing into the gullies of the marsh to stand starkly white in muddy creeks. Through his telescope a warden picks out a peregrine falcon hundreds of metres away on the marsh, perched on a driftwood spire like a gargoyle, waiting for one duck’s fatal false move. A ringtail hen harrier skims the ground along the seam of horizon. I shout about it but no one seems to hear. Everyone is busy watching, photographing, enjoying their own thing, their own long string of barnacle geese lifting off from the mud and flying to the merse each side of us, some overhead. The sound of their yapping calls – more beagle than bugle – is constant.
For expert David Borthwick what we are seeing is a sign of constant metamorphosis. He has written of this place as a ‘ space of come and go... ruled by the imperatives of flow’. He thinks of the wintering birds – the barnacle geese and whooper swans – as examples of this ever present flow; the way their common names change from Scandinavian to British at some unfixed point on their migratory route; the way that the reserve here raises the flags of their origins to welcome in the migrants. David also reminds us of another eminence of Scottish literature. Sir Walter Scott, while writing Redgauntlet, says, ‘ He that dreams on the bed of the Solway, may wake in the next world.’ It is tempting, idly, before we have another coffee to get our brains going, in the drift of dawn, to wonder if it’s true of the folklore of these geese too – bred on the Solway beds, hatched out of water into the world of land and sky.
Dawn changes constantly as well. At 7: 23am – a band of intense yellow sun, strips of orange and pink cloud turning grey just out of the sun’s reach. At 7: 28am – the intense yellow dissipates to a puddle of buttery sun, surrounded by rosy clouds, pink strips of sky and the clouds that had been grey are now shot through with light and glowing indigo, with a promise of blue sky peeking out behind. At 7: 37am – all intensity is gone, the sun shifts around behind the Lakeland fells, the clouds pink and dappled grey, more rolling in, snuffing out the blue, the yellow leaching out. The skeins of geese keep coming. The camera records them as wisps, a pale poly- winged smudge of geese in the now weakening light.
Gladstone thought that the barnacle geese were definitive of the Solway. He’s right. Against the grasses of the merse, they stand out starkly. But against that green background they flock tightly, and anyway those on the edges are always anxiously looking out. They can’t do that while sleeping. In the borderland of the light, somewhere between night and day, they make sense in the endless silver of the Solway. They are the colour of mud, water and rock. They are of the light.
I don’t want to go. But we have to leave. It is all too rare that we get to slow
After half an hour of standing in the first light, the birds come as if on the cue of dawn, as if flicked on by a switch of sunlight
down enough to watch the entirety of a sunrise, from dark to day. It feels special, particularly on Remembrance Sunday, a more meaningful, more poignant pause of reflection than that afforded by the planned pageantry in the town centre. We go for breakfast in the town’s Wetherspoon pub. The old boys in tweed caps talking about Queen of the South FC have put on their dark regimental jackets, polished their medals. They suck their morning pints more sombrely than before.
A website tells me that seasonal affective disorder is a product of indoor lives, that despite the windows we are starved of daylight. It sounds like an appeal to nature fallacy to me, but at this moment I am willing to give it a go. A friend buys us a SAD lamp, a thin box that projects a bright white light. Our cat seems to like it and chooses to sit in front of it instead of on our laps. The instruction leaflet suggests we should sit and stare into it from a distance of 20cm. We ignore that.
Wintering: A Season with Geese by Stephen Rutt is out now, published by Elliott & Thompson at £ 9.99