The Snow Geese by William Fiennes Read Free Book Online Page B

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