The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  Is it safe? they are wondering. Their uncertainty shows in the set of their wings and the slow banking turns of the skeins as they look down at the eagles in the trees. Shall we land?

  It is my question too.

  More skeins join the gyre and abruptly they pass a threshold. There are now enough birds willing to take the chance and they begin to spiral down. For each goose the risk of harm is smaller if it is not alone. The eagles watch them come. The geese resolve from specks into family parties flying together. Some are ‘blue’ snow geese, dark in the wings and body, but many parents are a dazzling white, with black wingtips and coral feet and bills. From below the white birds are lambent against the sky. Most pairs lead two or three greyer youngsters. Down they come, more and more, until it is snowing geese. The open water fills quickly. Latecomers land on the ice alongside. Ten thousand geese? Twenty thousand? More?

  The first arrivals start to bathe. They are too buoyant to submerge easily, so they duck their heads, curving their long necks to catch gleaming beads of water on their backs and letting them run away across their wings. They scrub their bills against flanks and splash again. Layer after layer of bathing geese, ghostly in the mist. The front birds are dark by contrast, goose-framing the seething bath behind, where shapes are revealed then hidden as the vapour shifts, making the scene seem timeless and elemental.

  They feel safe in these numbers, overwhelming the eagles in their trees and the coyotes hidden beyond. They are confident that the risk to each of them is low enough for some sleep, so they rest on the ice, tucking in their feet and pushing their bills into their back feathers for warmth. They are all facing the same way, in a repeating pattern of bodies outlined in gold. Their voices drop to a deep and constant drone, like hive after hive of bees. One extends its head and calls into its own private cloud of breath. They are oblivious to me. It’s a rare chance, made possible by the cold stopping them here and by the open water that drew them into its gloriously backlit vapour: and also by my sacrificed tea. I film them with my heart hammering, afraid the spectacle might end too soon, ecstatic at the shafts of light falling on goose shapes in the golden mist, at their blue shadows on the ice.

  And then an eagle flies. The flock wakes with a joint intake of breath. Every head rises. A vast ripple spreads as each goose stretches its neck to see beyond its neighbour. The birds on the ice are rigid. They can see the eagle coming. They can see its deep wingbeats and the purpose in its flight. It will pass directly overhead and they can wait no longer. They crouch and spring, clawing upwards. Another wave sweeps across the ice, a wave of thrashing wings and violent air. Between my heartbeats thousands of geese are up and going and as they go a gale hits the hide. Ice, dead leaves and water explode away from the pounding wings. The smell of birds, of barnyards and duck ponds, fills the wind and with it comes a chaotic sound: the panic of families calling to each other, trying to rise together through the churning air and the mass of bodies. The air is so dense with geese that I cannot see beyond them. Dazzled, the eagle veers away. It crosses into the clear air at the edge of the flock, with its head and curved beak facing downwards. It is searching for weakness.

  A goose crashes down, broken by an impact as it rose and crushed now by the ice. It seems that snow geese find safety in numbers from every threat except themselves. The eagle turns, stalls, and as it lands the others launch from their trees.

  The flock rises clear of the treetops, re-forming its lines against the sky. The geese in each skein space themselves evenly, feeling their way into the exact place where the moving air from the beating wings of the bird in front will save them energy as they fly. I watch them go, trying to judge from their direction and height whether they are leaving for the north or just moving to the larger lake.

  I film the eagles squabbling over the dead goose but my heart has gone with the others. Something extraordinary happened when they took off: beautiful individuals were transformed into a flock with its own means of deciding how to move, like a collective mind. It took possession of the space above me and made undreamed of patterns in the sky. Now I yearn to film a really big flock, but what is a really big flock of snow geese?

  Standing on a sea wall when I was a child, I once tried to count my local brent geese as they flew towards me, quickly totting up ten birds then scaling them up ten times to the space 100 would fill and mentally pasting that many, in blocks, across the flock. I rarely needed to make the next jump, to 1,000 birds, because only 5,000–6,000 ever spent the winter in Langstone Harbour, but the spectacle of them flying always made me pause.

  The snow goose population in the central part of North America has changed as wildly as the level of the Missouri River and arguments about how many there are have ebbed and flowed too. No one disagrees that there are more geese now than there have been for at least a century, but that doesn’t make them any easier to count. One way to do it is from aerial photographs, taken when they are evenly spaced and conspicuous, sitting on their nests on the Arctic tundra. Computers have replaced people at counting the dots but snow cover confuses them both. Estimates made like this and by counting the birds in their winter flocks suggest that about 3 million adult geese fly up and down the centre of the continent each year. The numbers are hard to check and the most reliable figures probably do not come from counting geese at all. Instead scientists put rings on the legs or necks of a known number of them, then wait to see what proportion of these ringed birds are reported by hunters. This statistical method has shown that regular counts grossly underestimate how many geese there are in the largest flocks. Ringing returns suggest that in recent years as many as 20 million adult lesser snow geese and 5 million youngsters may have headed south from their Arctic breeding grounds.

  Mandi sends me a text to say that masses of geese are now circling over her. She’s coming to collect me. It’s time to abandon the hide.

  She has been watching from a National Wildlife Refuge, one of more than 550 across the country. The first was set up in 1903 and they now cover more than 500,000km2 (more than 120 million acres) of the United States. This one is a patchwork of large, shallow lakes, fringed by cattail marshes and trees and ringed by a dirt road. From the high perspective of a migrating goose, seeing so much water must be very tempting, even when most of it is frozen. Driving there we pass fields of geese by the roadside. They are made of white plastic and stand on sticks among the stubble. Other battery-powered decoys whirl in tight circles to mimic landing birds joining the flocks. Men wearing camo and baseball caps walk among them, picking up the real geese they have lured down and shot. The gas stations and fast-food places in town are full of trucks, full of hunters. Putting them on their backs since 1990, reads the slogan on one man’s shirt.

  In 1916 a treaty was signed on behalf of Canada and the USA, to protect snow geese from hunting in the spring, in particular from the ‘indiscriminate slaughter’ of the unregulated market hunters who had driven the passenger pigeon to extinction two years earlier. The realisation that America’s most numerous birds were all gone had come as a tremendous shock. Only fifty years earlier there had been billions of passenger pigeons. The snow geese benefited: relieved of the spring hunt and protected by the new refuge system during their autumn migration, they started to recover.

  When we pull up by the lake on the refuge, the wind has strengthened from the south. It’s a warm wind, full of geese. There are lines of them as far as I can see, looking so much like oncoming aircraft that it feels like an invasion. The birds I filmed earlier were just an advance guard and now flock after flock of that size or more come spiralling down in front of us. Many land on the unyielding ice. Solid water is not their ally if an eagle comes, but the ice has started to melt and the open water is growing. Many geese settle on it and drift towards the bank. For the first time I can really see them as individuals. They have dark cutting edges to their bills and subtle whorls of feathers make ridges on their necks. I can see the small differences between the sexes: the greater h
eft of the ganders, with their larger beaks, and the gentler rounded heads of their mates. The lake is filling with so many geese that it feels as if we have the entire population of a city laid out in clear view, with every aspect of life going on. Young birds peck optimistically at the dead stems of last year’s plants and the large seed heads of lilies, protruding from the lake. Others preen, sorting out their feathers. A few youngsters and adults fly above the rest, calling for the families they have lost in the chaos of taking off. I watch one bird almost out of sight, then see it turn and come back, still calling. It’s astonishing that among so many they have any chance of finding each other by the sound of just one voice. Illness, old age and accident are here as well. Some geese seem too tired to carry on. One is unable to raise its neck and its head lolls in the water until it drowns. I imagine the eagles will come to take the sick and injured but for now they seem cowed by the sheer size of this flock. When two fly over they stay high, like airliners routed over a city, and the geese eye them without concern.

  The news has gone out on Facebook – ‘The geese are here’ – and the hunters arrive to take photographs and make jokes, while they wait for the birds to leave the refuge:

  ‘We haven’t brought enough shells. Who did the math? Fifty each is way too few.’

  It dawns on me that perhaps they are not jokes.

  Some people try to scare the birds into the air by running and waving their arms, holding their cameras ready, but the geese just swim a little further from the shore. Elderly couples, outnumbered by the hunters, stay just long enough to photograph each other with the white lake behind. ‘Have you tried to count them?’ they ask. ‘I got to a hundred and lost my place. Had to start again.’

  The friendly refuge manager stops to chat and I ask him if he knows how many geese there are: ‘Must be close to a million by now,’ he says. ‘We count them each week and today’s the day.’ He photographs the flock on his phone to show his wife.

  Until about fifty years ago America’s ‘mid-continent’ snow geese spent the winter on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, feeding on salt-marsh plants as they still do in the north, but then came a dramatic change in their fortunes. Many marshes were being drained or converted into oil terminals and refineries, which displaced the geese inland where they discovered that the prairie grasslands were changing too. They were being irrigated and used to farm rice and corn instead of cattle. Farmers increasingly used artificial fertiliser to guarantee a good crop and the grain they spilled at harvest time made ideal goose food. As a result more of the birds survived the winter and in twenty years from the 1970s their numbers quadrupled.

  The natural world and ours are inseparable. Changes in the fields of Texas and Louisiana began to make a difference as far away as the Arctic, where the large numbers of geese were damaging plants at the other end of their migration, around Hudson Bay.

  All afternoon the geese float down like snowflakes, filling the lake until the flock spreads almost to where we are standing, with the tripod and camera partly shielded by the car. Through the lens I can see a white field of heads stretching to the far shore. It’s a dreamlike landscape where clouds of birds drift to and fro, punctuated by puffs of white dust, the distant jets of geese startled into flight by each other’s shadows or a glimpse of a coyote in the reeds. They settle again quickly and whole families sleep, confident in their vast numbers. There are sixty or so bald eagles watching them but they stay in their trees or on the fringes of the ice, waiting to see what will happen when the geese fly.

  I have never seen so many birds, or any other animal. The largest sporting stadiums in the world could accommodate less than a tenth of this number of people. A passer-by tells us that so many geese weigh thousands of tons and they may soon submerge or break the ice: especially now it’s melting. He starts to do the sums: ‘Six pounds per goose, times … how many do you think?’

  That’s the question everyone is asking: ‘How many geese?’

  It is overwhelming to see so much life in one place, to know that some wild animals are booming rather than following the passenger pigeon, but the rise of the snow geese would have brought fewer problems if the animals preying on them had increased in parallel. Instead, most Arctic predators have to struggle through the bitter winter, while the geese are far away in the south, finding plenty of food in the fields. That’s why the birds make their enormous spring journeys, to nest in the north, where the winter strictly limits how many of their predators can survive. It’s been a winning formula so far.

  Two state conservation agents arrive: smart in their crisp uniforms, with their badges, black belts and holstered guns. Their job is to check hunters’ permits. Both of them photograph the geese with their phones. I ask them how many were left when they were first protected from the market hunters. They do not know.

  ‘They’re invasive,’ says one agent. ‘We conserved them and now there’s too many and we can’t get the numbers down. They’re destroying the tundra for other birds.’

  I ask him which other birds but he’s not sure.

  ‘How are they counted?’

  ‘They do it by area,’ says one. ‘They know the area of this lake, work out how much of it is covered by geese and multiply that by one and a half geese per square yard.’

  ‘Isn’t it two and a half?’ says the other.

  ‘Yeah, maybe, one or the other.’

  ‘So how many would you think are here now?’

  ‘Well, there’s sure a load,’ says one.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a bunch,’ says the other.

  They are keen to move on to more certain ground.

  ‘It’s going to snow again tomorrow.’ He checks his phone. ‘One tenth of an inch.’

  The refuge manager told us later that the official snow goose count for the day was 1,196,267: a number, I’m sure he would agree, which is as unfeasibly accurate as forecasting a tenth of an inch of snow.

  We like our numbers to be precise: they are our only means of grasping the unimaginable scale of gatherings like this, of labelling them and making them safe, but there is no safety in these vast numbers for the geese. Through the 1990s their population kept on climbing until it crossed an invisible line, beyond which it was apparently up to people rather than nature to decide how many geese there should be. This happened to the geese because we had changed their world. They had benefited from our conversion of the prairies into grain fields and now they were to be killed for seizing that chance to thrive. In 1999 their protection was removed, allowing snow geese to be hunted in the spring, with the aim of halving their population in six years. Lures and higher capacity weapons were permitted, without any daily bag limit. Twice as many geese were shot as a result but the growth of their population has hardly faltered. The sums had been based on the underestimates made when counting massive flocks by eye and from photographs. Even shooting a million birds a year has not made enough difference and the latest figures suggest that the geese have now escaped from ever being controlled by American and Canadian hunters shooting them. The next step might be to kill them at their nests or break their eggs but reaching their Arctic colonies to do this would be very expensive. Otherwise shooting them at night, using devices akin to landmines or perhaps even poisons, which could kill tens of thousands at once, have been mentioned as last resorts.

  I cannot look at the geese and stomach the idea of killing them in such vast numbers but these are complicated issues: in time they will probably colonise every suitable nesting place and then their numbers will stabilise and perhaps start to fall, but before then they will have damaged some of the tundra and the plants of the salt marshes and pools of Hudson Bay, and perhaps further north. When I was filming up there it was clear that the fragile Arctic vegetation takes many decades to recover. Sometimes the damage will be at the expense of rarer birds. Perhaps, though, the geese have simply recovered to their previous numbers, before they were hunted so intensively. No one knows.

  At present predators don�
�t make much difference to the geese but as the world warms the Arctic itself is changing. Hudson Bay is freezing later each year, giving its polar bears less time to hunt seals. In the summer the hungry bears are likely to find the expanding goose colonies appealing, and to spend more time searching for eggs, as the bears do in Svalbard.

  It is clear that what once seemed to be the right solution to the snow goose problem is not working. We have caused this problem and we should take responsibility for solving it, without killing millions of geese. We could consider the one solution no one mentions: farming differently, so that less spilled grain is available to them in the first place.

  Under a bright sun and the warm wind, the ice is thawing. It will all be gone in a few days but I doubt the snow geese will be here to see it. To them melting ice means it’s time to go. The sound of more than a million goose conversations is very loud, so when the hush falls it’s as if the lake is holding its breath. All their necks come up. Every goose is alert. Then comes a sound like a demolition charge, a sharp crump, muffled by the distance, then a tower block thundering down in ruin. The geese are taking flight. Away to the right a roar builds like surf pounding a beach, a jet engine spinning up and gaining power, the passion of a football crowd: all of these, merged into an overwhelming noise, white noise, which drowns the thunder of a 10,000-ton train on the railroad beyond the lake. I feel my ears clamping down in self-defence. Do I speak? If so, I cannot hear my voice.

  A wedge of black and white drives from the edge of the flock into its heart, a reverse blizzard rises from the ice: more and more and more geese rising. Others catch their panic and spiral upwards in a vortex, a tornado of bodies, of individuals subsumed by the flock. A force of nature, the goose wind, is beaten down by their wings, under a dark goose ceiling. They live in that wind and sometimes they die in it too.