‘No bird in Sussex is so emblematic of our skies’
Although we are used now to seeing enormous skeins of brent geese in our south coast harbours this has not always been the case.
It seems difficult to believe but between 1949 and 1952 not a single brent was seen in Sussex.
There had been flocks of them years before though most visiting Britain in the winter from their Arctic breeding grounds stayed in Essex and the Thames estuary.
Brent geese disappeared from our shores due to one man, Joseph Stalin.
Not only did this monster murder millions of land owners across the whole breadth of his own country, but after the war all political prisoners were instead moved into labour camps in the Arctic.
There they were put to work in the Gulag Archipelagos on building a railway.
The writer Solzhenitsyn described all in his best-selling novel.
The railway was an utter failure due to poor construction and melting perma-frost in summer but it kept Stalin’s enemies out of the way.
Of course they were half-starved but they found wild birds’ eggs in summer a life-saver.
These included brent geese which nest on the ground and their eggs saved many human lives, but at such a cost.
Somehow this little black goose survived, probably because Stalin died in March 1953 and that year 25 geese spent the winter in Chichester Harbour.
Ten years after the number was 600, and in another ten, over 4,000.
Not even Hitler has such a record of destruction against wildlife.
After the war agriculture changed rapidly when fertiliser was used on every field and this leached through the soil into the rivers and streams.
I took photos of the mudflats in the harbour in 1964 which had turned bright green as the algal plant enteromorpha spread across them.
Brent geese hitherto had fed on the sea grass zostera marina but this had died out in the 1940s.
Now they had a new food and took happily to the algae.
Then they decided that corn and grass crops above the sea wall were also nice to eat and in the 1970s upset farmers by trespassing on these crops, and some geese were shot under licence.
No bird in Sussex is so emblematic of our skies and the vast skeins and wild chorus they make resemble a wild symphony we enjoy for six months of the year.
In the distant past they were a quarry species and a dozen punt gunners in Sussex risked rheumatics and drowning hunting the geese in the starlight when flocks came in from a mile offshore in darkness to feed on the zostera.
The saying was that to cook a brent goose or that close relative the barnacle goose you needed to put a brick in the oven with them. When the brick was soft the goose was cooked.
Sussex gunners had several names for the bird, one being Crocker, due to the warning call it makes.
Another name was the sea Seaford Parson.
Presumably one was shot there and on examination its white collar resembled that of a cleric.
Scotch goose described its main area of winter habitation but mostly we hear them making that wonderful wild chorus just as pinkfoot geese do on the east coast of England.
Let us hope the present changes on the Russian Arctic coast from oil exploration to climate change do not give them yet another cause for decline.