THE FIRST GOOSE COUNT OF THE YEAR

North Point, Wells-Next-The-Sea.

    

At 6.00am, only a few lights betray the waking villages of North Norfolk. In Wells-Next-The-Sea, a baker's van makes its delivery and further along the quay, fishermen are readying the crab boats for the morning tide. Driving east out of Wells, I pull in to the rough track which overlooks the pools of North Point to wait for first light and the pink-footed geese lifting noisily from their overnight roosts to head inland to feed. 

In truth, my expectations are not high. A few birds have been roosting here at North Point but, looking north to the sea, as Norfolk folk often seem to do, the bigger counts will be made away to my left - at  Burnham Deepdale, Burnham Norton and especially at Holkham - and to my right, at Stiffkey and the birds coming in off East Hills. 

The North Norfolk coast is a nationally renowned site for thousands of migrating pink-footed geese which trade in the arctic winter for our more clement version here. Their joyful clarion calls can be heard from early September as they return to the county's network of marshes and sandbanks, primarily on the Holkham NNR, where the wetlands offer them natural protection from predators. 

Numbers peak later in the season - once, in January 2006, at 90,000, but these days at just over half of that figure - and provide one of the UK's great wildlife spectacles, as long lines of amiably cackling geese stretch out across Norfolk's wide skies.

Dawn seeps in over the fields from Stiffkey and Warham, and the restless chatter of the waking feral flocks of greylag and egyptian geese begins. A few hunched muntjac deer head across the newly-ploughed stubble for the shelter of nearby woods. Light quickly charges the day and soon flocks of starlings, redwing and fieldfare, themselves fresh in from Scandinavia, are hustling over the hawthorns underneath smaller groups of greenshank and godwit heading south as avian air traffic control assumes its seasonal synchronicity.

And then, on the end of a high-pitched, slightly querulous call, a small group of  'pinks' materialises in the bruised blue of the early morning, quickly followed by two more - 32 birds in all - lifting up from behind a skirt of reeds, gaining height and then flying swiftly into the patchwork of shadowy fields which rise up behind me. 

Larger skeins then begin to appear from the offshore roost at East Hills; over a thousand birds passing directly above in broad arrowheads or occasionally in overlapping waves which merge and then redirect themselves purposefully into the interior, all the while creating a fierce, resounding cacophony which pulls together the ragged skies, the salty margins and the tingling chill of the Arctic tundra. It is as if a huge pack of hounds are hunting the heavens, baying excitedly at the wild freedom of the chase, and their sudden passing leaves a momentary vacuum as if all of nature has held its breath in wonder.