The Snow Geese (3 page)

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M
Y FATHER LOVED BIRDS
. A birdfeeder hung from a bracket at the back of the house: a long, thin tube of green wire mesh, chockfull with premium Hsuji peanuts. You could see the feeder through the French windows that opened on to the small paved terrace, and if you sat still you could watch coal tits, great tits, blue tits and sometimes nuthatches ransacking the store of red-husked nuts, the nuthatches easily picked out by their blue-grey backs and the way they clung (upside-down, tails-up) to the green mesh. I’d never paid them much attention as a child. A wren’s habit of cocking its tail wasn’t nearly as alluring as sport or pop music or television. I didn’t want to listen when my father pointed out wagtails speedwalking across the lawn, chaffinches perched on the roof-angle, or the way a green woodpecker flew in bounds, folding its wings and losing height between bouts of flapping, so that you saw an undulation like someone stitching a hem and could say the name of the bird before you’d even made out the colour of its plumage.

But when we came back from the hotel, I wanted to learn about birds. I couldn’t shake
The Snow Goose
from my head. I wandered round the garden, equipped with my father’s Zeiss pocket binoculars and a simple beginner’s field guide, looking for birds, trying to learn their names. Sometimes I’d describe a bird to my father and he’d name it for me: goldfinch, blackcap, yellowhammer. It must have been a surprise for my parents to see me showing these signs of enthusiasm: for months I’d been sullen, despondent, introverted, caught up in my own fears, resentful that my life had been interrupted so violently. In hospital, I’d longed to be at home. But by the end of May I was sick of it, restless, hungry for new experiences, different horizons. When I read Gallico’s descriptions of the flights of geese, I wondered at the mysterious signals that told a bird it was time to move, time to fly.

I shared it, this urge to go. I was getting stronger. I was strong enough to be curious. It was as if I were trying to redeem my earlier failure to notice, the way I gave my attention, as I never had done as a child, to the swallows, swifts, rooks, wagtails, finches, warblers, thrushes and woodpeckers around the house – my father ready with a name, a habit, a piece of lore. I loved the swifts most of all. I’d never watched them so intently. My father said that after they left the house at the beginning of August many of them wouldn’t land or touch down until they came back to nest the following May: they drank on the wing, fed on the wing, even slept on the wing. I thought of Gallico’s snow goose flying south from the Arctic each autumn, the pink-footed and barnacle geese moving back and forth between Rhayader’s sanctuary and their northern breeding grounds. Why did birds undertake such journeys? How did they know when to go, or where? How did swifts, year after year, find their way from Malawi to this house, my childhood home?

I was excited about something for the first time since I’d fallen ill, and I needed a project, a distraction, a means of escape. I carried books about bird migration up to a room at the top of the house, a real cubbyhole, tucked in under the roof, its low ceiling mottled with sooty drifts and rings, as if candles had smoked runes on to the cracked plaster – a room we knew as the eyrie, because it had the high, snug feeling of an eagle’s nest. The pattern of fields I could see through the little two-light window was second nature to me, and I knew what each field was called: Lower Quarters, Danvers Meadow, Morby’s Close, Allowance Ground. Sometimes swifts screamed past the window as I sat in the eyrie, studying ornithology.

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W
E ARE TILTED
. This was the first thing to understand. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit round the sun. It is tilted at about 23.5 degrees. The tilt means that the northern and southern hemispheres are angled towards the sun for part of the year, and away from the sun for another part of the year. We have seasons. Climates turn welcoming and inhospitable in regular sequence. Food supplies dwindle in one place even as they burgeon in another. All creatures must adapt to these cycles if they are to survive. Migration is a way of coping with the tilt.

Hooded warblers, weighing a third of an ounce, fly more than 600 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, and so do ruby-throated hummingbirds, less than four inches long, their wings beating twenty-five to fifty times a second. Red-footed falcons fly from Siberia and eastern Europe, crossing the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas on their way to savannahs in south-eastern Africa; demoiselle cranes fly over the Himalayas
en route
to their Indian winter grounds; short-tailed shearwaters fly from the Bering Sea to breeding colonies off southern Australia, arriving each year within a week of the same date; the chunky, short-legged waders called red knots fly all the way from Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego, an annual round trip of almost 20,000 miles. An Arctic tern, flying from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again, might travel 25,000 miles in a year – a distance roughly equivalent to the circumference of the Earth.

Six hundred thousand greater snow geese breed on north-eastern Canadian Arctic islands and migrate south each autumn over Quebec and New England to winter quarters along the Atlantic from New Jersey to North Carolina. But these are far outnumbered by the lesser snow goose,
Chen caerulescens caerulescens
, probably the most abundant goose in the world. The lesser snow occurs in two distinct colour phases. ‘White-phase’ snow geese have white plumage and black wing-tips; ‘blue-phase’ geese have feathers of various browns, greys and silvers mixed in with the whites, giving an overall impression of slaty, metallic blue. Blues and whites pair and breed together; they roost and migrate in mixed flocks. Both have orange-pink bills, narrower than the black bills of Canada geese, with tough, serrated edges for tearing the roots of marshland plants. A conspicuous lozenge-shaped black patch along each side of the bill gives them a grinning or leering expression.

Six million lesser snows breed right across the Arctic, from Wrangel Island off Siberia in the west, to Hudson Bay, Southampton Island and Baffin Island in the east, and at the end of summer they migrate to wintering grounds in the southern United States and northern Mexico. These are demanding, hazardous journeys of two or three or even four thousand miles, but the advantages of migration outweigh the risks. In the high Arctic latitudes, snow geese find large areas of suitable nesting habitat, relatively few predators, an abundance of food during the short, intense summers, and twenty-four hours of daylight in which to feed. And before the Arctic winter sets in, before their food supplies are frozen or buried deep under snow, they can fly south to exploit the resources and hospitable conditions of their winter grounds.

As I read, sitting in the eyrie, I kept thinking back to Gallico’s story, Frith arriving at Rhayader’s lighthouse with a wounded goose in her arms, either a greater snow goose or a white-phase lesser snow, knocked from its course by a storm as it flew south in its family group. I sought out photographs of snow geese: the wintry, laundered freshness of white plumage immediately after moult; the dense, lacquer-black eyes that glinted like china beads; the wing bedlam of flocks rising from marshland roosts. I was drawn to these images. I felt shackled, cooped-up. It was as if I’d glimpsed birds through the high, barred window of a cell. Day by day, my restlessness intensified.

Then my father found an old map and left it on my bed in the dressing-room – a map of the Americas, rumpled and stained, worn through wherever foldlines intersected, with the flights of migrant birds streaking across it from one end of the continent to the other, Cape Horn to the Chukchi Sea. And the first thing to catch my eye was the long curve of watercolour green that represented the flight of midcontinent lesser snows, perhaps 5 million birds, from the Gulf coast of Texas north across the Great Plains towards Winnipeg; over boreal conifer forest and open tundra to Hudson Bay; and then on across the bay towards Southampton Island and a peninsula at the southern tip of Baffin Island called the Foxe Peninsula, or Foxe Land. I traced this route again and again across the map, dreaming of escape. Huge numbers of lesser snows nested in Foxe Land. One area, the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak, was said to support more than a million geese. What would they
sound
like, a million geese? What would it be like, I wondered, to see those flocks with my own eyes, coming into Foxe Land on the south winds?

I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with snow geese to the Arctic. The pang of nostalgia, the intense longing to go home I had experienced in hospital, had now been supplanted by an equally intense longing for adventure, for strange horizons. I was as desperate to get away from home as I had been to return to it. I went back to the university at the end of the summer, but my heart was no longer in my work. I kept thinking of snow geese. I had been immersed in everything that was most familiar to me, that reeked most strongly of my past, and I was hungry for the new, for uncharted country. I wanted to celebrate my return from the state of being ill, find some way of putting the experiences of hospital behind me, the fear and shock of those weeks, the sense of imprisonment. I wanted to declare my freedom to move.

I booked a flight to Houston for the end of February, intending to find snow geese on the Texas prairies and follow them north with the spring.

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T
HE DAY BEFORE
I left for Texas, I took the train home from London. In the afternoon, my father and I went for a walk. A pink kite was snared in the churchyard yew tree; there were clumps of moss like berets on the corners of the headstones. We climbed a gate and strode out across Danvers Meadow, heading westwards, leaning into the slope, last year’s sere beech leaves strewn through the grass. My father was wearing tan corduroy trousers and an old battered green waxed jacket; in one pocket he kept a matching green waxed hat in case of rain. We were walking at a steady pace, talking about the journey ahead of me, the rhythm of the walk going on under the words like a tempo.

A drystone wall ran along the ridge ahead of us, and we knew exactly what to expect from that vantage: gentle undulating country, a system of quickthorn hedges, stands of trees, fields ploughed or planted or left for grazing, and, beyond Lower Clover Ground, a cattle building with a corrugated roof, the herd’s breath rolling out as vapour over wide steel gates. There were three straw bale ricks next to the building, with ladders and broken wood pallets propped against them, and further down the valley, beside the Sor Brook, stood a farmhouse with smoke rising from a brick chimney, a clutch of chicken sheds, a bunting of pink and white towels strung on a clothes line. This prospect was as familiar as our faces, as inevitable and apt, with spinneys, hedges, fields, slopes and the two buildings in their allotted places, each thing distinguished by a name: Hazelford, Buck Park and Jester’s Hill; Frederick’s Plantation, Stafford Wood and Miller’s Osiers; the Brake, the Shoulder of Mutton, the Great Ground.

We climbed a stile and walked on down towards the cattle building, the backs of my large black gumboots flopping against my calves. The drone of a twin-prop plane made us look up: a few cumulus clouds, purple-grey underneath, topsides gleaming like schooner sails; the furrowed white streamer of a contrail; the bounding flight of small birds. We heard the clang and judder of cattle on the steel gates, the herd breathing like organ bellows. A triangular sign said
Use Crawling Boards on this Roof
, and on the far side of the building there were grey feed troughs and wire fencing rolls, an open flatbed trailer, an old matt red Massey Ferguson combine and a heap of distressed farm machinery: ploughshares, harrows, iron scuffles, rusting discs and tines. Beyond the building the ground fell away to our left, down to the Sor Brook and the cricket-bat willows planted alongside it, their leaves a flashy bluish-green in summer. The brook ran past the farmhouse: a former mill, a tall, narrow building with white-framed windows under black timber lintels.

We passed the farmhouse, keeping to the high ground, with the Sor Brook meandering below us on our left side, and then we turned down the slope to the brook and walked back against the current through Keeper’s Meadow and Little Quarters, the ground here disrupted by the red-brown earthworks of moles. Month-old lambs, and ewes with daubs of red paint on their haunches, grazed close to the quickthorn hedge; wool tufts were snagged on the quickthorn. There was a constant background chirrup and twitter, and at intervals the boom, quite far off, of a bird cannon. We walked side by side, opening gates and latching them shut, getting closer and closer to home. The spire came into view, the weathercock’s tailplumes glinting in the low sun, and then the white stone chimneys of the house: our points of reference. There was no part of the world I knew so well, or loved so deeply. We walked up to the house, gravel crunching underfoot, taking our coats off as we approached the front door, the rooks garrulous in their high perches. I trod on the heels of the gumboots to get my feet out, and my father put one hand out against the wall to steady himself while he unlaced his boots.

Later, with the heavy red curtains drawn across the French windows, we leaned forward over my map of the Americas, following the flight of snow geese from Texas to Foxe Land. The mantel clock ticked; the fire snapped and puttered like a flag.

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I
FLEW TO
H
OUSTON
, rented a metallic blue Chevrolet Cavalier and drove west towards Eagle Lake. It was exhilarating, just the thought that I should be in Texas, on my way to find snow geese, under my own steam, out in the world, in the new. And it
was
the new: coarse scrub prairie and fields ploughed for rice and sorghum running flat in all directions; windmills, cylindrical rice bins and galvanized farm sheds; pumping jacks going like metronomes in the blue half-light; and the silhouettes of mesquite trees like ancient Greek letters propped up on the narrow levees. I was already looking for geese: excitement – threshold alertness – warded off jetlag, and my eyes, like two small birds, flitted from place to place.