To honour 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. Stuck at home with no work and no people, I got on my mother's 40-year-old bicycle and followed Norfolk's thrilling flocks of pink-footed and brent geese. Equally evident from the text is Nick’s depth of knowledge, of the geese and the other wildlife portrayed in this book, but also of the landscape in which he was born and raised. Now he mostly stays close to home in North Norfolk, where he grew up and where generations of his family have lived and farmed, working for Norfolk Wildlife Trust and appreciating the flora and fauna on his doorstep.

His book is an intimate diary of his sightings and his experiences with the geese-loving communities he met along the way.Nick has contributed to New Networks for Nature, Norwich Science Festival, British Bird and Wildlife Fair, Self-Isolating Bird Club, The Tree Council's Hedge Harmonies, and Oxford Real Farming Conference. What emerges is a sense of shared passion, and a shared responsibility for the future of these birds. This resonance is particularly strong for those birdwatchers, and others, who are rooted within the landscapes touched by these birds on their long migratory journeys. A beautifully crafted journey and for any lover of the natural world this should be high on the to be read list. Over seven months, Nick cycles over 1,200 miles—the exact length of the pinkfeet's migration to Iceland.

Passionately committed to wildlife since childhood, Nick has worked his entire life in biodiversity and landscape conservation.

Birds continue to arrive in the UK from more northerly regions to spend the next few months here in our warmer winters, before. His beloved pinks soon budge up and make room for other members of the two goose types classified in Latin as Anser and Branta.

Some fellow enthusiasts mentioned in dispatches, good sorts who like him rarely talk of anything else, also photograph or paint geese. None outstays its welcome – most of the 100 chapters are two pages or less – allowing the Argentinian novelist to interrogate colonialism, exploitation, even Shakespeare. The meaning of migration, it turns out, is more complex and downright epic than our group over-confidently supposed.Amazingly, greylag pairs who keep losing chicks will foster their young out to more successful parents, who are willing to adopt as it improves the odds on their own chicks’ survival. I enjoyed every line of his writing, I felt that Norfolk cold along those narrow roads and the tremendous feeling when watching geese whiffling at Holkham.

In their flocks, Nick encountered rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese, and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother's copy of Peter Scott's field guide as a child. The lovely people at Chelsea Green Publishing sent me an advanced copy and I've been savouring it over the past few weeks. 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. This diary of that time is quite beautiful in its detail of the pink-foot, brent and snow geese he watches from the edge of fields.Well-known for the breadth of his knowledge on nature and the environment, and the wit and ease with which he explains complex ideas, Nick is an experienced broadcaster with a wide range of credits.