Above all, it is the story of Nick Acheson’s love for the land in which he was born and raised, and for the wild geese that fill it with sound and spectacle every winter.

During a time when many people faced the prospect of little work or human contact, Nick followed the pinkfeet and brent geese that filled the Norfolk skies and landscape as they flew in from Iceland and Siberia. Whether on his own or with friends and experts, and in fair weather or foul, he became obsessed with spending as much time observing geese as he could – even six hours at a stretch.In their flocks, Nick encountered rarer geese, including Russian white-fronts, barnacle geese, and an extremely unusual grey-bellied brant, a bird he had dreamt of seeing since thumbing his mother's copy of Peter Scott's field guide as a child.

A beautifully crafted journey and for any lover of the natural world this should be high on the to be read list. In the preparation of his first book he cycled 1,200 miles on his mother's forty-two-year-old bicycle. To honor the geese's great athletic migrations, Nick kept a diary of his sightings as well as the stories he discovered through the community of people, past and present, who loved them too. That much is apparent in The Meaning of Geese, a charming account of a winter’s attritional goose-watching in north Norfolk.

Undoubtedly the book is a treasure-trove of facts and figures about these remarkable birds, but to me the author rarely conveys his sense of wonder at being in their presence, evoke the Norfolk landscape or convey the changing of the seasons. Next time I'm birdwatching in Norfolk, I'll be looking a little more closely at the various species of geese, and wondering where they've been, and where they're going.