The pink-footed goose, or pinks as they are known round here, are not a species I was familiar with when I lived in Devon. I knew of them of course, but they don’t tend to make it that far south on their annual migration from their breeding grounds in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. They prefer the rugged, open landscape of the Scottish coast to the rolling hills of south-west England — and these days, so do I.
It feels a little incautious to be extolling the virtues of wildfowling when we are potentially staring down the proverbial barrel of a wildfowling moratorium in light of the worsening bird flu outbreak, but I will endeavour to do so — a joyful task indeed for the most part. Let’s start with the species.
I do not claim to be an expert wildfowler but I do love chasing wild birds, and the skeins