The Snow Geese Read Online Free

strong enough to be curious. It was as if I were trying to redeem my earlier failure to notice, the way I gave my attention, as I never had done as a child, to the swallows, swifts, rooks, wagtails, finches, warblers, thrushes and woodpeckers around the house – my father ready with a name, a habit, a piece of lore. I loved the swifts most of all. I’d never watched them so intently. My father said that after they left the house at the beginning of August many of them wouldn’t land or touch down until they came back to nest the following May: they drank on the wing, fed on the wing, even slept on the wing. I thought of Gallico’s snow goose flying south from the Arctic each autumn, the pink-footed and barnacle geese moving back and forth between Rhayader’s sanctuary and their northern breeding grounds. Why did birds undertake such journeys? How did they know when to go, or where? How did swifts, year after year, find their way from Malawi to this house, my childhood home?
    I was excited about something for the first time since I’d fallen ill, and I needed a project, a distraction, a means of escape. I carried books about bird migration up to a room at the top of the house, a real cubbyhole, tucked in under the roof, its low ceiling mottled with sooty drifts and rings, as if candles had smoked runes on to the cracked plaster – a room we knew as the eyrie, because it had the high, snug feeling of an eagle’s nest. The pattern of fields I could see through the little two-light window was second nature to me, and I knew what each field was called: Lower Quarters, Danvers Meadow, Morby’s Close, Allowance Ground. Sometimes swifts screamed past the window as I sat in the eyrie, studying ornithology.
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    W E ARE TILTED . This was the first thing to understand. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit round the sun. It is tilted at about 23.5 degrees. The tilt means that the northern and southern hemispheres are angled towards the sun for part of the year, and away from the sun for another part of the year. We have seasons. Climates turn welcoming and inhospitable in regular sequence. Food supplies dwindle in one place even as they burgeon in another. All creatures must adapt to these cycles if they are to survive. Migration is a way of coping with the tilt.
    Hooded warblers, weighing a third of an ounce, fly more than 600 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, and so do ruby-throated hummingbirds, less than four inches long, their wings beating twenty-five to fifty times a second. Red-footed falcons fly from Siberia and eastern Europe, crossing the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas on their way to savannahs in south-eastern Africa; demoiselle cranes fly over the Himalayas
en route
to their Indian winter grounds; short-tailed shearwaters fly from the Bering Sea to breeding colonies off southern Australia, arriving each year within a week of the same date; the chunky, short-legged waders called red knots fly all the way from Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego, an annual round trip of almost 20,000 miles. An Arctic tern, flying from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again, might travel 25,000 miles in a year – a distance roughly equivalent to the circumference of the Earth.
    Six hundred thousand greater snow geese breed on north-eastern Canadian Arctic islands and migrate south each autumn over Quebec and New England to winter quarters along the Atlantic from New Jersey to North Carolina. But these are far outnumbered by the lesser snow goose,
Chen caerulescens caerulescens
, probably the most abundant goose in the world. The lesser snow occurs in two distinct colour phases. ‘White-phase’ snow geese have white plumage and black wing-tips; ‘blue-phase’ geese have feathers of various browns, greys and silvers mixed in with the whites, giving an overall impression of slaty, metallic blue. Blues and whites pair and breed together; they roost and migrate in mixed