Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

It is a fact. Brent geese buzz. I heard it again last week when they were grazing the cereal fields next to Fishbourne channel. It only happens when they are happy, and then not all the time.

A skein of 300 came off the water looking like one of those swarms of bees you see in July travelling to form a new colony.

Tightly bunched, a mass of black bodies in the sky, they wheeled in a wide arc as they checked the fields for security.

They were all shouting their heads off, yelping with a clamour that sometimes reminds me of a hundred railway trucks slamming their buffers together as they come to a halt.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette February 20