They came straggling in overhead – a loose skein of perhaps four dozen geese. They stretched apart, then came together again with an elastic ease; clear, brassy voices sounded, clashing and concordant at once. They’re back.
Every winter, Orkney plays host to about 70,000 Icelandic greylag geese. They cruise in towards the end of summer, the cold weather closing in behind them, and stay until spring. You’ll find them everywhere – paddling in the shallows, floating in rafts on the ruffled inland lochs. Most of all, however, you’ll see them in the fields.
More birds than livestock, all gathering in great flocks to graze. There are curlews too, poking around with their curving proboscises. Starlings lifting in shivering masses, alighting on fences, power lines, and then back down in the grass. Rooks all in an uproar, bickering in the low evening light.
But it’s the geese that get the farmers going. It’s their sheer force of numbers, their voracious appetites. They trample the fields, eat the crops, nip the fresh new grass before the cows can get to it. Disturb them and they rise up as one cacophonous wave, a thousand adenoidal complaints echoing off the hills and rebounding, reverberating through your body.
They’re new here, relatively speaking. There were no geese in the 1980s, either visiting or resident. A few trickled in during the 1990s, to make 300 breeding pairs by 2002. By 2008, there were 10,000. Now 25,000 or so live here year-round – and then there’s the Nordic hordes. It’s thought rising temperatures allow them to settle farther north – save effort during their annual migration.
Farmers use many strategies in their resistance. There are scarecrows in fluorescent jackets, looking like they’ve walked in off a road crew. Air cannon fire late into the night. Shooting parties stalk the marshlands at dawn. For a while there was a full-time “goose scarer”, who pursued them through the fields, shaking rattles on a pole. To little avail. Earlier this year, NatureScot announced that it would cut funding for goose management. It looks like they’re here to stay.
Still, for the unlanded, the skeins can be a guilty pleasure. I like to watch them fly over: time’s arrows, shooting in from the north. Heralds of the cold weather to come.
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