Pinkfeet and warm wellies at Vane Farm.

Dawn flight at Roy's Folly, with Reed Bower beyond.
 The photo was taken from Kirkgate Point
by Chris Gomersall. 

Pink-footed geese have always been the star turn at Loch Leven and we often had several thousand in the back field below the hill and even more on the shore-line. The evocative sound of Norfolk pinkfeet takes me right back to Loch Leven. The sound of one pink-foot is not hard to describe (they say "wack-wack") but the sound of 15 or 20 thousand of them is more challenging. I think it's like being stuck in a tunnel while the Flying Scotsman goes through at full steam, inches from your face. Mostly I encounter flocks of two to three thousand at a time and they sound more like an airborne commuter train passing low overhead.

Pinkfoot (on the left)
Gordon on the right.

Their pink legs are not the best identification feature as they are often hidden by grass or tucked up in flight, and anyway, other geese have pink legs too. What I look for is a smallish brown head on a slim brown neck that clearly ends in a pale breast. It looks like they have been upended in hot chocolate. Their wings are pale grey and their small bills are dark with a pink band, but you rarely get close enough to see that because these birds are very flighty, partly because they are regularly shot at, but also because there could be 20,000 pairs of eyes in a big flock, all looking out for trouble.

Goose-watching has its own vocabulary that comes largely from those who hunt them, with a bit of aeronautics thrown in. I suppose I picked up the jargon from Sir Peter Scott, who was a hunter, painter, skater, conservationist, siler and glider pilot. He understood wildfowl better than anyone I ever knew.

Geese landing on stubbles.

The word "flock" best describes geese on the ground when they behave like sheep with feathers on. Geese are, after all, grazing birds, like walking lawnmowers with feet placed in the middle for walking, rather than at the back for swimming. I think the word flock is appropriate when they are on the water too, but maybe "flotilla" would be better? Geese become much more visually interesting when they take to the air and then we need a richer vocabulary to describe what we see. They embody wildness and freedom. "Flock" just doesn't cover it because it sounds too domestic.

If geese are disturbed by people or another predator, they all rise in the air at once in a "pack". If they take off from water or an open field they soon start to form strings that we call "skeins". (A skein is a length of yarn or wool, usually stored in a loose knot and the term was borrowed to describe the stringy formations that geese make.) These skeins are most obvious when the birds are flying towards you or away from you. The birds try to fly in line abreast, possibly because their vision is best to sides rather than the front like us. If the skein stays airborne long enough, such as on migration, then "chevrons" start to form as individual birds become leaders.  One of my favourite sights is to see hundreds of knotted skeins of geese coming in off the sea or flying off the Loch with the blue hills behind.

Rear view. Gordon get's goosed.

I loved to watch the geese "whiffling in" to the island at dusk. In order to drop steeply into a small space they spill the air from under their wings by rocking from side to side, a ploy often used by pilots of old fashioned planes to prevent overshooting the runway. Just before touch-down geese drop their "undercarriage" and spread their webbed feet to act as air brakes. By this point they are going so slowly that they are in danger of stalling so they reconfigure their wings by sticking their thumb feathers (alulae) up to form a flap, just like a modern jet. The operation is very similar to a jet fighter landing on the short deck of a carrier.

I was honoured (and terrified)  to give a talk about the geese in Cleish to an audience of locals, many of whom were our neighbours and mostly involved in agriculture. It was an important talk for me so I prepared it really well. The first slide was black and the plan was to play a tape of the geese "flighting" from the loch at dawn. It would start quietly and build to a crescendo as I showed more and more slides of the skeins of geese rising on a grey morning that slowly got brighter. The lights went down, the black slide did its job and I groped for the tape player in the dark, knocking it onto the floor. I then pressed the fast-forward button and the play button at the same time which resulted in a cartoonish falsetto din. People fell about laughing and I never really regained control of the situation.

Front view.
Gordon with a greylag.

In my day we would look for the first arrivals from the Arctic in late September, but the big flocks would pile in during October so that there could be well over 20,000 roosting on St Serf's Island at night. We counted them at dawn as they flew out to feed on the surrounding farms. Gordon the Warden allocate us counting spots and we would do our best to estimate the numbers. My notebook looked like this: 1+22+52,+78+ c2000+ c3500 etc. So that was 5653! I always think an odd number sounds more convincing.

Dawn counts were better than evening counts because the birds would often drift in during the failing light or even after dark when we couldn't see them. At least, if birds were late in the morning you could see them, unless it was foggy.

I remember one morning we waited and waited for the fog to clear, sure that the birds were still on the island because we could hear them, but when the sun eventually broke through we saw them already on the fields. They had swum ashore under the fog, not willing to get airborne. On moonlit nights it was even more tricky because the birds often fed under the moon. Then you could be staring at an empty Loch as the sun rose, only to have them come home for a bath at 10 am.

The ringing team with Gordon Wright.

Ringing the geese was a spectacular and rather violent affair involving nets that were attached to projectiles like mortars that were fired from tubes stuck in the ground. This was called "cannon netting" and was considered better than rocket netting because it didn't produce masses of smoke and didn't fail quite as often. The birds would be encouraged to feed on the right spot for several days beforehand by spreading liberal amounts of grain or potatoes around, then the nets would be set in darkness, covered with loose straw and then all would be in place by dawn. The cannons were wired together and fired from a central control box, so hopefully they would all fire at once, carrying the nets over the feeding birds before they knew what was happening. Then the crew would run out from their hiding places to make sure no birds escaped and start gathering them into sacks for processing. The birds calm down if they are kept in a dark space. The rings were usually aluminium BTO rings with a number and a return address embossed on them but sometimes larger coloured rings were used that could be read through binoculars, assuming your birds were not swimming, or walking in long grass.

The results of the ringing programme revealed where the birds stopped off in Scotland and England and we now know that we had birds from Iceland and Greenland, but I'm guessing the Loch Leven birds are mostly Icelandic while the west coast birds might be from Greenland. Gordon once led an Earthwatch trip to Svalbard to ring some geese, but I think that those birds mostly winter in Denmark and Holland.

Chris Gomersall, the RSPB's photographer, and I, set out to get some stock footage of the geese for the Lodge. I fired off about three (expensive) films in the first session, but he didn't take any pictures! What he did was to stake out locations and gauge what the light might be like at certain times of day, then he put up a hide and got some crackers. Filming for the TV with Bill Oddie was a bit more of a one-shot chance, but I betted on a good view from near Kinross House and we did well. A young lass had entered a competition to win this day out with Bill and had chosen to come to Loch Leven. Bill was a great host and I'm sure she will never forget the day, and neither will I.

A twitch for an Arctic redpoll.

Another film crew came to film a documentary about the ruined castle that sits on on an island off Kinross. Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner there, and it's a bleak sort of place. This was all organised through Gordon, who was off somewhere at the time, so Hanna got the job of ferrying the crew out across the grey loch. It was well-paid work, so Hanna was really pleased to be able to buy herself an engagement ring from her earnings. (Don't say it, I know, but I am half Scots and the other half is Yorkshire so you wouldn't expect charity from me would you?)  The ring was later stolen during a party at our house on Mahe in the Seychelles. Our American friend Becky waved her huge diamond in my face and said, "Oh Jim, you have to buy her another one. Imagine how I would feel if I lost this!"  ................I thought about this for a moment then answered...."Weightless?"

I used to drive around the loch, spotting where the geese were feeding so that visitors would get a chance to see them. Even so, they could be hard to find. Grey and brown geese on a muddy field don't stand out very well and you could easily drive past a thousands of them without noticing. Hanna and I were on such a recce one day when we found a yellow neap-field full of corn marigolds. I had to stop and take photos and so we parked up and climbed the gate, only to spot that someone was there before us. An Indian gentleman in a city suit was standing in the middle of the flowers, surrounded by migratory silver Y moths. More amazingly we knew him! "Isn't that Prakash Gole?" said Hanna. And so it was. He was a leading and inspirational conservationist, the Indian Peter Scott, whom we had both met at a Wildfowl Trust Conference. Just like us, he was simply entranced by what was around him.

The Fife and Kinross bird-race teams.

We always had a good variety of wintering wildfowl below the Vane. At that time the RSPB didn't approve of feeding the birds, but I would sneak a bit of grain out when the weather was hard, sometimes skiing on the ice while pulling a sledge. We had packs of widgeon and teal close by and diving ducks out in the water. Highlights included the odd long-tailed duck, a snow goose or two, stray Greenland white-fronted geese and an American widgeon.  If we fancied a change of view, a quick trip to Largo Bay would produce rafts of eiders, scoters and scaup on the sea, so winter was never boring. Today you have a chance of a white tailed eagle over the house in winter, or an osprey in summer.

Apart from the wildfowl there was plenty of bird life to keep us interested  In spring the curlews, redshanks and lapwings returned to the shore while, on the hill, we had breeding redpolls and tree pipits. The Benarty crags were dominated by a pair of peregrines and several nesting fulmars, which may seem odd so far inland but the sea is closer than you might think. You can see across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and beyond to Bass Rock and North Berwick from the top of the hill.

The range of habitats at Vane Farm.

The BTO Breeding Bird Survey was carried out by two of us over the spring in six or more sessions, usually from dawn 'til 10 am, but we sometimes had to do do an hour at dusk if we hadn't got all the way round the site. My favourite dawn count started in the back yard when I heard a strange bird-song coming from the hill, just above the house. It turned out to be a beautifully lit red backed shrike, sitting on a fence. I also remember finding a bluethroat on spring migration in the Cleish Hills.

When should you visit? For me it has to be late autumn when the geese are streaming in and there's snow on the tops.