Idling down to Abergafren on a dank autumn evening, I heard the calls high above – a yapping and yelping like a litter of young pekingese dogs, a sound that used to be one of the identifying features of this lovely estuary of the Dwyryd. Reaching the shore, I took out my glass and focused on a flight of seven birds, gliding down towards Glastraeth. Their faces were white-masked; barred wings flickered stroboscopic silver; pale bellies and rumps glowed in the dimity light. Barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) – one of my favourite birds, down from their breeding grounds in the Arctic.
Thirty years ago I used to walk here daily, often with my good friend and near-neighbour, the sculptor and writer Jonah Jones. We’d encounter on a regular basis huge flocks of barnacle geese, curlew, pintail. Whether through climate change or disturbance by the very active local wildfowling fraternity I don’t know; but none of these species is now present in anything like their former numbers. I do know the flood of pleasure this glimpse of a small remnant of the place’s former glories gave me, as I watched the ragged little band’s flight down to sandy rhines and samphire pastures on the farther shore to feed.
These beautiful, medium-sized geese have a strange presence in medieval bestiaries. Folklore had it they were the adult form of goose barnacles. Gerald the Welshman wrote of them in his Topographia Hiberniae that “Bishops and religious men in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they are not flesh nor born of flesh”. Pope Innocent III whipped the recusants into line early in the 13th century, noting with sound good sense that since in all particulars they behaved like geese, geese they must be, and therefore not to be eaten during Lent.
I like the passage from the Book of Changes, the classic Chinese text also known as the I Ching or Yi Jing, which describes cries of the wild geese as “like the red threads that bind us to our fates”. May the geese be protected from all unkind fates!
