Why You Hear Geese Going Over in November, and Why It's Worth Stopping to Listen

If you have been out early this week, or standing at the back door at dusk, you may have heard it before you saw anything. A loose, high chatter coming from somewhere above, getting louder, and then a long ragged line of geese crossing the sky. In much of Britain this is one of the sounds of November, and once you know what it is, it is hard not to stop and look up.

Many of the geese you hear at this time of year are pink-footed geese, and they have come a long way. The British Trust for Ornithology describes how, each autumn, almost the whole population that breeds in Iceland and eastern Greenland flies south-east to spend the winter in Britain. The first calls are usually heard from late September, and by November the big flocks have settled in for the season.

There are a lot of them. The October 2020 count by the Goose & Swan Monitoring Programme, run by WWT and BTO, recorded around 485,000 pink-footed geese, and more recent surveys suggest numbers have dipped a little since. Most gather in Scotland, Lancashire and Norfolk, but skeins pass over towns and villages well beyond those places, which is why so many people hear them without ever going looking.

The reason you tend to hear them at the edges of the day is their routine. Geese spend the night together on safer water, estuaries, lochs and mudflats, and fly out at first light to feed on farmland, coming back again as the light goes. So the sound arrives at the same quiet moments, on the walk to the car or the last stretch home, when there is little else to hear.

The shape of the flock is part of it too. Geese often fly in a V or a long, shifting line. Research on migrating birds, including a 2014 study in Nature by Portugal and colleagues that tracked northern bald ibises, found that birds flying in a V position themselves to catch the uplift from the bird ahead, which saves effort over a long flight. The calls seem to help them keep in touch as they go. What reaches you on the ground is a group of animals keeping together, a long way up.

Part of what makes the moment feel calm may be the way it pulls your attention. Most of the sounds we hear in a day ask something of us, a ping, a voice, a reminder. A skein of geese asks nothing. You look up, you follow it until it is gone, and for half a minute your attention is out there instead of in your head. That kind of gentle, effortless noticing is close to what researchers mean when they talk about nature resting a tired mind.

You don't need to be a birdwatcher to enjoy it. If you want to hear them on purpose, step outside for a few minutes around sunrise or sunset on a still day, when sound carries well, and face towards open ground or water if you have some nearby. Listen first. You will often hear them a good while before they appear, and long after they have passed.

None of this will change a hard week, and it is not meant to. It is a small, seasonal thing, and those are easy to miss in November when the days are short and most of us are hurrying between indoors and indoors. Next time you hear that high chatter overhead, it might be worth stopping on the pavement and letting it go by.

If you can't get outside, make a quiet zen on Create Your Zen with bird song over a forest or the open road, keep it low, and give yourself the same few minutes of looking up.