Over seven months, Nick cycles over 1,200 miles—the exact length of the pinkfeet's migration to Iceland.

The pandemic gave Acheson fallow time to mount his rickety bike and scope Norfolk for the “thousands of lives brought here by wind, genes, instinct and the planet’s axial tilt”. 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. He was a wildlife guide in South America and Africa for more than a decade before, waking up to the enormity of the climate crisis, he vowed never to fly again. Nick now lives very close to his childhood home, in a little flint cottage by a duckpond on a North Norfolk village common.This was indeed to be a low-carbon initiative, undertaken on his mother’s 40-year-old red bicycle and spanning September 2021 to the start of the following spring. Framed by living alone during lockdown, the narrative reveals a broader community of goose enthusiasts, drawn together by a fascination for these winter visitors, both common and rare.

Many of us took up hobbies during the lockdowns - reading, gardening, DIY, baking sourdough and banana bread - but for Naturalist Nick Acheson, the pandemic inspired an epic adventure. He has an essay in Low Carbon Birding published by Pelagic, which was chosen as British Birds Best Bird Book of the Year 2022. This book is so much more though than just about Norfolk and about geese; it is a beautiful personal journey for the reader.Nick has through his knowledge, passion and detailed descriptions put a winter visit firmly back onto the agenda.

I learned a lot of information (Egyptian geese it turns out aren’t really geese and the Slimbridge bird sanctuary in England is responsible for Hawaiian geese not becoming extinct) as well as being horrified at the dangers of lead pellets, shooting practices and difficulties geese face. You sense that going back to the murky Glasgow of Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, was as much fun for the author as her increasingly broad church of readers. But The Second Cut is as blackly comic as it is squalid and Welsh balances all the storylines with ease. What emerges is a sense of shared passion, and a shared responsibility for the future of these birds. Local places, plants and species are referred to meticulously and at times I wondered if Acheson was perhaps too familiar with his subject to consider those readers for whom these names might not resonate.

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. Above all, it is the story of Nick Acheson’s love for the land in which he was born and raised, and for the wild geese that fill it with sound and spectacle every winter. The Covid-19 lockdowns spawned a number of nature books in the UK and, although the pandemic is not a major element here, one does get a sense of how Acheson struggled with isolation as well as the normal winter blues and found comfort and purpose in birdwatching. 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.

Over the last 20 years or so, we have visited North Norfolk in winter to satisfy our birding needs, alas during the last 3/4 years due to Covid and other factors we have only visited in the spring. The company publishes authors who bring in-depth, practical knowledge to life and give readers hands-on information related to organic farming and gardening, ecology and the environment, healthy food, sustainable economics, progressive politics and most recently, integrative health and wellness. He then explains how during COVID he decided to follow Norfolk’s geese on his bike over the 2020-2021 winter.The Meaning of Geese is the story of how he found purpose in a seven-month, 1,200 mile cycle journey (the exact length of the pink-footed geese’s migration).