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

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Twenty years on, Welsh’s auctioneer sleuth Rilke has another mystery to solve – his old mate washes up dead after tipping him off about a house clearance – but this time in a city pockmarked by Grindr, gentrification and a pandemic. 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 is never happier than when reading Shakespeare or listening to Bach in his garden, embraced by the happy hum of wool carder bees and Willughby's leafcutters. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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. He is best known in East Anglia where he makes regular appearances on ITV Anglia, BBC Look East and BBC Radio Norfolk, and presents films for Norfolk Wildlife Trust, Green Light Trust and Pensthorpe. The Meaning of Geese is a book of thrilling encounters with wildlife, of tired legs, punctured tyres and inhospitable weather.

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. Passionately committed to wildlife since childhood, Nick has worked his entire life in biodiversity and landscape conservation. 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. By November he has started to think like geese, to feel their overhead chatter vibrate in his chest.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. 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.

Nick now lives very close to his childhood home, in a little flint cottage by a duckpond on a North Norfolk village common. During a time when many people faced the prospect of little work or human contact, Nick followed the pinkfeet and brent geese that filled the Norfolk skies and landscape as they flew in from Iceland and Siberia. 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.