Bog Myrtle & Peat

The last few days have brought geese in dribbling teams from the far north. I heard them first on Sunday evening, and I ran from the smouldering stove to watch them pass high and steady above the farm. I saw fifty birds in a chattery skein through the sunset. Then on Monday morning I looked up to find a hundred more. Out on the hill last night, two hundred geese passed over the rim of the Southern Uplands and set their sights on the marsh and merselands of the Solway. Even this morning at the cusp of dawn, the early clouds were hung with new arrivals, and there can no longer be any hint of a doubt. We’re on the lip of winter.

It’s hard to convey the enormity of this return. The swallows have slipped away through my fingers, and for all there are birds turning and hawking in the early dusk, they are no longer recognisable as mine. They’re in gangs of twenty and thirty, and they roll away at  the lightest enquiry. The chances are that these birds have come from somewhere further north, and I’m seeing them in transit. But they pass with an echo of their former selves, and it’s hard to draw a line between presence and absence.

But there’s no mistaking the geese, which summon up memories of brutal winter and the gabble of black skeins in the snow. I recall mornings when geese where the objective of a shooting trip; iced hours in patient waiting; the flare of birds suddenly recoiling from an ambush; the thump of hard, bone-broke bodies on the frozen ground. I look back to flighting geese in the moon; hunting the steamy stars for the chance of a shot – they’re always further off than they seem until suddenly they’re upon you and it’s all you can do to contain your eyes in their sockets.

But closer than these marvels is the steady presence of wildfowl as a backdrop and the sound of a Galloway winter. By the time January comes, I will hardly look up to the summons of a thousand geese above the farm. The wink and gabble of moving birds will run like a crusted file across everything I do, from feeding cattle and splitting firewood to dyke repairs and the rumbly hum of the oatmeal bruiser.

It’s been hard to remember the spectacle of forty thousand geese heading down to roost on the sea mud. Summer rubs away such memories until they seem like a dream. It’s a comfort to find that I have not imagined these birds which come on the edge of night; at ten to five on a shortened day. It takes the full procession almost twenty minutes to pass in the starlit dusk, and soon that hair-raising spectacle will be part of my day again.