Where to see pink-footed goose in the UK

How to find pink-footed goose

This is one of the few British bird spectacles where the numbers are genuinely difficult to comprehend. A roost on the Wash or the Solway can hold tens of thousands of geese, and they all leave at once.

Go at dawn. That is not a suggestion — the whole experience is the morning flight, when the birds lift off the water in waves and head inland to feed. It lasts perhaps forty minutes, starts before proper daylight, and if you arrive at nine you have missed it entirely.

The sound is what people remember. Not the sight of the skeins, which photographs adequately, but the noise of several thousand geese calling at once, which doesn't. It arrives before you can see anything and carries a surprising distance in cold air.

October is the peak month, when birds newly arrived from Iceland pile up before dispersing. November through February still holds big numbers but they thin out and spread across more sites.

Dress for standing still in the dark in an east wind, because that is precisely what this involves. And check the roost site rather than the reserve — geese move between waters through the season, and last week's spectacle can be five miles away this week.