Country diary: stirring calls give vent to the beautiful unity of geese in flight

Claxton, Norfolk: Geese follow each other closely to reduce the energy they expend, but here the practical is tied up with the emotional

They came out of a backlit umber sky produced by the cloudbank that had just given us a double rainbow. Now it brought on dusk prematurely. They were pink-footed geese in three silhouetted echelons, and when the first turned westwards the sounds of them poured down upon us as if a door had suddenly been flung open to let those voices out of all that air.

Pink-footed geese, en masse, create a strong note that is high like oiled steel, with a hint of nails-on-blackboard shrillness, but it also yields an overlapping music that seems full of shared, windblown exhilaration. I have watched winter geese fly to roost for nearly 50 years and routinely ponder what it is that fills me with such feeling each time.