They came out of a backlit umber sky produced by the cloudbank that had just given us a double rainbow. Now it brought on dusk prematurely. They were pink-footed geese in three silhouetted echelons, and when the first turned westwards the sounds of them poured down upon us as if a door had suddenly been flung open to let those voices out of all that air.
Pink-footed geese, en masse, create a strong note that is high like oiled steel, with a hint of nails-on-blackboard shrillness, but it also yields an overlapping music that seems full of shared, windblown exhilaration. I have watched winter geese fly to roost for nearly 50 years and routinely ponder what it is that fills me with such feeling each time.
Partly I think it is the birds’ togetherness: the way that every pair of wings rises and falls in rough synchrony. It means that if one lead goose turns, all following will turn, so that the line of the V dips or climbs, bulges or contracts, in staggered sequence. Such resulting patterns are beautiful.
Frans de Waal argues in his superb forthcoming book, Mama’s Last Hug (Granta, 7 March), that many social animals, including ourselves, possess “mirror neurons” that enable one individual to unconsciously copy the actions of another. And this mimicry is important to social cohesion. It is why we yawn when we see others do so. It’s why those whose faces are swollen with Botox encounter problems, because their facial musculature cannot replicate the micro-expressions of others and they both are and seem detached, like plasticised dolls.
Geese follow each other closely with good reason, because the action of a bird in front creates aerial lift to help the one behind. Their coordination thus reduces flight effort. It is practical, but infused with this functional mechanism is a sense of emotional unity to which their calls give vent. At end of day, as light fades and the sense of visual order decays, as our world succumbs to the entropy of a wild winter’s night, the geese assert a last sense of warm-blooded communion that no amount of cold or darkness can diminish.
