The Meaning of Geese: A Thousand Miles in Search of Home

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His book is an intimate diary of his sightings and his experiences with the geese-loving communities he met along the way. I would have welcomed more autobiographical material, and Wintering by Stephen Rutt seems the more suitable geese book for laymen. Thank you very much to the publisher and NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Nick Acheson is one such individual, and the significance of the pinks, brents and white-fronts that winter in his north Norfolk landscape is evident from his engaging and beautifully delivered text. What emerges is a sense of shared passion, and a shared responsibility for the future of these birds.

I saw Nick chairing a discussion at the Gathering Festival at Wild Ken Hill last year, and when I saw he had his first book coming out I was desperate to read it. There are several interesting themes running through the book - the impact of climate change, hunting, geese in the creative imagination, conservation - but the diary format prevents these from being developed. For WWF and other conservation NGOs, he worked with indigenous communities and national parks to develop ecotourism and sustainability projects.

I'm thrilled to be sharing my native Norfolk (and other sites around the UK) with Wildlife Worldwide clients again. Greeted by tuts and sarcastic eye-rolls, he set the bar a little higher and off we went to gawp at feathered friends through binoculars. Superbly translated by Jennifer Croft – the description of the quiet, injured man “lying Britishly on the mountain” is wonderful – this book becomes a viewpoint from which we can see the whole world. At the risk of reviewing the book I wanted to read rather than the book it is; The Meaning of Geese is billed on the cover as a personal account, but I felt no closer to the author by the final chapter than I had at the start.

For a number of years he has written columns for the Norfolk Magazine and for Norfolk Wildlife Trust's Tern magazine, of which he is editor. Mainly written as a diary of Acheson’s daily discoveries and sightings during 2020-2021 this format worked really well. That’s not to say that Acheson is not successful at painting word pictures of geese; his rich descriptions, full of food-related and sartorial metaphors, are proof of how much he revels in the company of birds. The lovely people at Chelsea Green Publishing sent me an advanced copy and I've been savouring it over the past few weeks.

He is a committed campaigner on the environment, living as sustainably as is possible and contributing to a number of environmental initiatives, including Low Carbon Birding. Born and raised in Norfolk, Nick has a life-long love for wildlife and particularly the wild geese that arrive there in their thousands every year. Nick has written widely on the natural world and our relationship with it, both in Spanish during his life in South America and in English.To honor the geese's great athletic migrations, Nick kept a diary of his sightings as well as the stories he discovered through the community of people, past and present, who loved them too.