Bog Myrtle & Peat

It has been a fantastic week for geese. Huge numbers have been flying back and forth over the house, and when I got home last night with a full moon rising, I heard the distinctive call of pink foots from the farm over the road. It didn’t take long to throw on some jackets, fetch the shotgun and head out into the rapidly freezing darkness.

Settling in as close as I dared beside the birds, I began to call and immediately heard an anser (pun guiltily intended). It seemed that the geese had settled en masse on the back of a neighbouring hill, and while there was plenty of cackling from small groups, they were fairly well determined to stay put. Down the valley, a party of greylags shrieked and grumbled to themselves, but it seemed that my single call wasn’t enough to pull any of them near enough for a shot. I even wondered if I would be able to see them in the moonlight if they decided to come in for a look, but when I found that I could see a barn owl sailing silently over a fence eighty yards away, I knew that the visibility was more than adequate.

After an hour of waiting, there was a tremendous roar, and more than 5,000 pink foots soared into the darkness less than half a mile away. They were easily visible as they took to the sky, and the moon picked out highlights and silhouettes as they turned and returned to land again a short way away. Nothing would encourage them to come within shot, and with one wellie filled with water, I was beginning to really feel the cold. I left them under the moon after two hours with as much satisfaction as I would have felt if I had had a tremendous amount of shooting. Very little beats spending time around large numbers of geese, and despite my failure to bring anything down, the experience was utterly unforgettable.

As well as the geese, I heard a number of teal, wigeon and mallard calling from the bog below the house, and they may well warrant some attention before the end of the season…