The Snow Geese Read online

  The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards flicking on metal masts. Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Each speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon’s circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms: kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn’t move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the snow geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds – urgent sharp yaps in the thrum and riffle of beating wings and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it. Nothing had prepared me for the sound, this dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at breaktime, a drone-thickness flecked with high-pitched yells, squeals, hollers and yawps – the entire prairie’s quota of noise concentrated in Jack’s holding pond by the two-storey house and the raised lake stocked with bass for fishing. I breathed it in. It was seven o’clock. There was a half moon. I waited until the birds were settled, then drove back slowly along the farm tracks, leaving the headlights off until I reached the highway.

  2 : AUSTIN

  FOUR EVENINGS IN A ROW I waited for geese at Jack’s roosting pond. I sat on the bonnet of the Cavalier, flicking through field guides or looking north, imagining the Great Plains stretching away to Canada, and all the snow geese already on the move, bound for traditional staging areas in Nebraska and the Dakotas. There were always a few ducks on the water, a few sandhill cranes foraging with lanky grace in the ploughed land at the edge of the pond, and herons and pelicans, and shambling longhorn cattle, and red lights glowing in strict, linear constellations on the radio masts. My pulse quickened as the same thousands of geese converged on the roost. I took shelter inside the car, wise to the turd squalls.

  The snow geese had been gleaning for leftover grain and grubbing for the roots of sedges and grasses. They were about to depart on a migratory journey of around 3,000 miles: they had to have sufficient energy reserves for the flight ahead. Twice a year, before they migrate, birds go through a period of intensive eating, or hyperphagia, during which they lay down deposits of subcutaneous fat: essential fuel, providing twice as much energy per unit of weight as carbohydrate or protein. Some birds, like the blackpoll warblers which leave the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England on 2,000-mile non-stop flights over the Atlantic to the north-east coast of South America, almost double their weight before departing on migration.

  Many birds winter close to the equator, where there are no reliable seasonal variations (shifts in day-length, temperature or the availability of resources) to provoke such changes in behaviour. Yet these birds fatten, and depart for their breeding grounds, at appropriate times. When Eberhard Gwinner kept willow warblers in temperature-controlled chambers with constant cycles of twelve-hour days and twelve-hour nights from the end of September, they still moulted and came into migratory condition in the spring at the same time as control birds kept in cages on their African winter grounds.

  The warblers were not relying on environmental cues: the changes in their behaviour were prompted by an internal clock consisting of two fundamental rhythms. Circadian rhythms, corresponding to the twenty-four-hour cycle of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, regulate daily changes in metabolic rate, body temperature and level of alertness. Circannual rhythms, corresponding to the annual cycle of the Earth’s orbit round the sun, control changes in behaviour associated with reproduction, moult and migration. These rhythms are not exact, but are tied to the natural day and year by external indicators called Zeitgebers, from the German for ‘time-givers’. The most important Zeitgeber is photoperiod: the amount of daylight in a given day.

  A snow goose, like all migratory birds, inherits a calendar, an endogenous programme for fattening, departure, breeding and moult. This schedule is essentially fixed, but it can be fine-tuned by environmental conditions. Due to the early spring, snow geese had been leaving the prairies around Eagle Lake a week or two sooner than Jack and Ken had come to expect. Millions of geese had already left their winter quarters for Arctic breeding grounds, and the flocks roosting by Jack’s house would soon be following them. Each evening, I’d driven back from the holding pond to the motel elated, songs blasting, the wild lung-top gabble of the flock still ringing in my ears. And I became restless too, eager to be on the move, to be covering ground, working north towards Foxe Land.

  I found Ken in the Sportsman’s Restaurant, stroking his ginger beard like a sage. I thanked him for his help; he wished me luck.

  Outside, heat haze rose off the asphalt like a version of water.

  *

  ELEANOR WAS SIXTY-SEVEN, a small woman with a bird’s light bones. Her soft white hair had the airy, fluffed-out quality of down feathers, and she raised her hands occasionally to pat at it with open palms, attending to the outline. Crow’s feet rayed out from the corners of her eyes, deepening when she smiled, and there was a red flourish in both her cheeks like the smudges left on bats by new cricket balls. When she greeted me at the door of her house she was wearing pastel-blue cotton trousers with an elastic waistband, and an old green sweatshirt that served as the plain setting for an elaborate brooch: a tin plate equipped with knife, fork and spoon.

  ‘Welcome!’ she said.

  We hadn’t met before. Her nephew, whom I’d met in England, had put us in touch, and Eleanor had offered me a place to stay if I passed through Austin on my way north with snow geese. She lived in a residential district west of the centre of Austin, in a single-storey house of pink-tinged Arkansas ledge stone, with a neat shallow-gradient slate-tile roof and a basketball hoop still screwed into the wall, though her son had long since left home. She had been married to an architect; they had designed the house together. Nearby houses strained for peculiar grandeurs: mock, ivy-covered castles with turrets and arrow-slit windows; plantation-style villas with white Palladian porticoes; soft-cornered adobe bungalows complete with protruding pine roof beams and ristras of red jalapeño peppers. Young mothers pushed children in streamlined prams under the evergreen live oaks. Driving with the window down, I could hear the sibilance of lawn sprinklers and the harsh, cracked-whistle calls of grackles, and when the sprinklers came into view there were slips of rainbow caught in their ambits as if in the finest fishing nets.

  ‘Come inside,’ Eleanor said. ‘We’ll get you settled in.’

  The walls were panelled with walnut: the living-room had the mild light and coolness of a glade. Dishevelled oriental rugs lay on polished bare wood floors. Sunlight, filtered by trees, entered through sliding glass doors. There was a sofa upholstered in faded mulberry cloth, and a well-worn leather armchair bearing Eleanor’s precise indentation, with an Anglepoise lamp on an end-table beside it. Black-and-white photographs hung in silver frames: tuxedos, evening gowns, brides and grooms, diploma scrolls. A black upright piano stood against the far wall, a volume of Bach open at a polonaise, and opposite the piano stood a threefold Chinese screen with trees, foliage and exotic birds in enamel and mother-of-pearl on a black background, and a column of Chinese calligraphy on each of the three panels.

  ‘It’s from a dynasty,’ Eleanor said. ‘Though search me which.’

  Between the screen of birds and the sliding windows was a hip-height round wooden table covered with tortoises. Eleanor collected them on her travels, and she’d placed them carefully on the table, evenly spaced, all facing in the same direction, towards the pi
ano at the far end of the room. Some had tails and some didn’t. There were delicate glazed grey, green and blue ceramic tortoises; chunkier, rough-clay tortoises; invertebrate fabric tortoises with beanbag fillings; dirty brass or steel tortoises, their shells inverted to make ashtray bowls; leather tortoises conceived as purses, with zips along the back or side; tiny glass tortoises, like raindrops with limbs; and tortoises carved from hard, dark woods, with grid patterns seared into their shells by red-hot pointed tools. One of the tortoises had a smaller, baby tortoise crawling up over its shell, and one was a jelly mould made of lightweight metal.

  ‘My mother gave me my first one,’ Eleanor said, taking a medium-sized grey ceramic tortoise from the middle of the parade. ‘After that I looked out for tortoises. Antique stores, markets, bazaars. If I go away, I always try to find a tortoise.’

  To enter the walnut-panelled corridor that led from the living-room to the bedrooms, you had to pass through swinging walnut doors, slatted like Old West saloon doors.

  ‘This is you,’ Eleanor said, showing me into the small guest bedroom. ‘I’ll leave you for a minute.’

  A birdcage on the chest-of-drawers: an elegant antique birdcage of thick brass wires that curved together at the top, forming a dome, with a rod for perching and a brass ring for hanging the cage at the zenith, and everything in the room subordinate to the cage, the clean, bright wires enclosing the not-here of the bird inside it. I put my bags down and contemplated the room: the same glade atmosphere, with wood on the walls and underfoot, the floorboards part-covered by a needlepoint rug in bold dahlia colours, Eleanor’s handiwork. I unzipped my bag, took out my bird books and binoculars, and put them on the chest-of-drawers, next to the empty birdcage.

  I took it all in, this new place: its colours and textures, its different lights, its things. Above the bed hung a drawing of a cowboy, riding a horse at a rodeo. The horse was executing a buck, poised on its hind legs, head and neck angling downwards, front legs about to hammer the ground. The cowboy was airborne, bounced a foot from the saddle. One hand held the reins; the other was held out over the horse’s head. You could see that when those front legs hit the ground, the cowboy would slam back into the saddle and lose his balance, jolted, but for now all was poised and beautiful – the rider’s flaring leather chaps, adorned with rosettes; his saddle’s horn, skirt, cantle and bucking rolls; the tapaderos on the stirrups; the leather fenders. A small patch of shadow on the rider’s Stetson indicated the depression where his fingers would grip to lift the hat to a lady.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ Eleanor asked, peering into the room.

  We passed back through the swinging saloon doors like gunslingers. I followed Eleanor into the kitchen, and watched as she put some water on to boil, a spiral glowing orange on the electric hob. She didn’t have a kettle. She had two cast-iron skillets, one six inches across and one nine and a half inches across, and used these to boil water for tea, the smaller skillet holding just enough water for a single mug, the larger just enough for two. She handled the skillets using one of two quilted oven pads, a black sheep and a white sheep, their fleeces browned and singed through by burns. Her birdlike lightness and the rugged iron heft of the pans seemed imagined by two radically different minds.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this,’ she said, watching the water in the skillet. ‘I love being a part of this adventure.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘I just read The Snow Goose. I wanted to have an idea of what set you off on this I don’t know what you’d call it. And it’s so sad!’

  She was holding the skillet’s handle with the black sheep, watching the water.

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s amazing that water boils,’ she said. ‘All those little bubbles suddenly appear. What tea would you like?’

  She opened a cupboard to the right of the cooker: it was crammed with boxes of loose leaf teas and tea bags – black teas, green teas, exotic herbal infusions and improving, medicinal tisanes, their bouquet wafting from the open cupboard.

  ‘There’s no shortage of teas,’ she said.

  We both chose peppermint. Eleanor returned the black sheep to the cooker rail: the two sheep flopped over the rail like people touching their toes. Magnets held postcards, photographs and cartoons to the white fridge: pictures of pianos, virtuoso pianists, piano lessons, sheet music. The magnets themselves were treble clefs, bass clefs, quaver pairs and miniature grand pianos. In the middle of the fridge, held to the metal by two pianos, was a piece of card on which Eleanor had copied out a proverb: It takes both rain and shine to make a rainbow. Her handwriting took a vine’s delight in winding and spiralling tendrils.

  I followed Eleanor out through the sliding glass doors on to a roofed balcony that jutted into crowns of elms, live oaks and pecans. A set of wind chimes hung in one corner – six metal tubes of different lengths, like tubular bells, with a wooden puck in the middle, attached to a square metal sail. The sail got wind of the faintest breeze and carried the puck from bell to bell, sounding low, hollow notes. Squirrels ran along the boughs; glossy, purplish-black grackles bungled noisily in the leaves.

  We sat down at a glass-topped table and jigged our teabags by the strings.

  ‘So how about these geese?’ Eleanor asked.

  I told her about the roost at Eagle Lake, the sunset returns of blue-phase and white-phase snow geese. Millions of birds, I said, were already coursing up the flyways, across the Great Plains, towards Manitoba. They were heading for traditional staging areas in Nebraska’s Platte River valley, the lakes of South Dakota and North Dakota, and the grainfields west of Winnipeg. After resting, and replenishing their fat stores, they would push north with the leading edge of spring towards nesting grounds along the edge of Hudson Bay, and, further north and east, on Southampton Island and Baffin Island. I mentioned the tilt of the Earth, circannual rhythms, the period of intensive feeding that precedes migration, the twice-yearly restlessness that prompts birds to undertake such ambitious flights.

  In accordance with their inherited calendars, birds get an urge to move. When migratory birds are held in captivity, they hop about, flutter their wings and flit from perch to perch just as birds of the same species are migrating in the wild. The caged birds ‘know’ they should be travelling too. This migratory restlessness, or Zugunruhe, was first described by Johann Andreas Naumann, who studied golden orioles and pied flycatchers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Naumann interpreted Zugunruhe to be an expression of the migratory instinct in birds.

  Circannual rhythms control the onset of Zugunruhe; restlessness prompts the birds to depart. Migrants do not need to rely on the example of parents or other experienced individuals. In some cases, birds do not even have such examples to follow. Eurasian cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, obliging surrogate parents to rear their chicks. As soon as they have laid their eggs, adult cuckoos are free to migrate: most fly south in July. Young cuckoos migrate about a month after their true parents. Rather than following their foster parents, these juveniles fly by their own instincts to join adult cuckoos in African and south-east Asian winter grounds.

  Both the need to migrate and the route to be taken are at least partially coded in the genes. Caged birds do not only get restless, they get restless in a particular direction. Each autumn, populations of garden warblers migrate from Germany to Africa via Spain and Morocco. They fly south-west to the Strait of Gibraltar, then head south and south-east to their winter grounds. Garden warblers raised in cages under constant environmental conditions begin to exhibit Zugunruhe just as their counterparts in the wild are setting off on migration. The caged warblers show distinct directional tendencies. They hop towards the south-west while free warblers are flying south-west across France and Spain. The caged birds then change direction and hop south and south-east just as the free birds are turning south and south-east over Gibraltar. They seem to act out the entire course of the migration in the confinement of their cages.

  Birds, it
seems, are genetically programmed to fly in a certain direction for a certain period of time. If these inherited instructions are carried out, the bird will arrive in its breeding or winter grounds. But migrating birds must have a way to compensate for unpredictable environmental conditions: individuals flying with the wind behind them cover much greater distances than conspecifics flying into headwinds; storms may blow them off course.

  The flexibility of a bird’s innate programme was demonstrated in the late 1950s by the Dutch ornithologist A.C. Perdeck, who captured more than 11,000 starlings near The Hague during their autumn migration from breeding grounds in north-west Europe, following the North Sea coast in a general south-west direction towards winter quarters in Holland, Belgium, north-west France, Ireland and southern England. He ringed every bird, having first identified its age and sex.

  The starlings, loaded in bamboo cages, were immediately flown to Switzerland and released near Basel, Zürich and Geneva. Three hundred and fifty-four were recovered. Perdeck found that most adult birds had flown from Switzerland on north-westerly courses, and that some had actually reached their normal winter grounds. But the juveniles tended to fly south-west, ending up in southern France, or even Spain. Inexperienced starlings were not able to adjust to the displacement. In adult birds, the endogenous migratory programme was modified by experience, while juveniles flew on a fixed heading, with no regard to circumstance.