If you want to see a bean goose in the UK you need to make your way to the Slamannan Plateau – an area of high land between Cumbernauld and Falkirk. After Kat walked past the Special Protection Area for the bean geese in the summer, while on her Green Belt walk, she returned in the Autumn to meet the people monitoring the geese and see these incredibly special birds.
I have been fascinated by the Taiga bean geese of the Slamannan plateau, since I walked that way during my walk circumnavigating the Green Belts of Glasgow. Even being there in July, it felt remote and windswept – despite the roosting lochs which have special protection for the geese being only 2kms from the edge of Cumbernauld.
Back in the early 2000s, when I was working with Nature Scot (then SNH), the area was being designated as a Special Protection Area (SPA) and an SSSI for the bean geese so I knew it was special. But it was a place I had never visited.
I decided to go back there in the Autumn when the geese had returned from their breeding season in northern Sweden. So I got in touch with Angus MacIver, who has been monitoring the geese since the 1980s and writes a blog about them and only a couple of days later met him, and Billy Thomson at a rendezvous in Slamannan village on a clear October day. I’d driven over the Slamannan plateau to get there across miles of moorland, passing a couple of lochs before coming into the village past a wood that was littered with Volvos: decrepit Volvos crammed in under every tree.
It had been a balmy autumn day when I left home, but up here on the plateau the wind was bitter. “You come up on the plateau and it’s a different place altogether” said Angus as I pulled an extra jumper on.
Angus moved to the area in 1976 to work in the prison at Falkirk and was looking for something to do nearby, having always been a birdwatcher, when he found out about the bean goose monitoring.
The geese had been back just a week, after a non-stop flight from near Oslo, making landfall at Whitby and then heading straight back home to Slamannan. Angus showed me the track of the flock on his phone, a line of spots on the map showing the exact route the tagged female had taken. Angus and the team, with researchers from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, have been tracking the goose flock since 2011 and have confirmed that they are the furthest west breeding population of the Taiga bean geese, nesting in northern Sweden.
We drove out to one of their favoured feeding haunts, passing a farmer on the way and stopping for a quick chat out of the window while we waited for the farmer’s son to drive a cow past the car and into a field beyond. Angus emphasised the working relationship the bean goose team have with local farmers – “We know every farmer on the Plateau” he said, waving his hand across a mosaic of numbered fields marked on the 6 or 8 square kilometres on his map.
“We’ve worked closely with them for so many years” he said, explaining that the good relationships are key to ensuring the bean geese can live amicably with the farming interests.
We’d found the flock grazing on a sloping field not far from the road and Angus and Billy quickly set up their tripods and telescopes, “you count the birds, I’ll check for neck collars” said Billy. There were about 50 birds in the flock. Billy showed me a goose through his telescope which had a neck collar.
“That’s tag 5” he said, “a three year old female”, The track I’d seen on his phone was the route of the satellite tag she carried. Her mate is a male with ring number V8 but he hadn’t been seen yet.
6 golden plovers flew over, all pointy with a flickering flight in the wind, and I pointed them out, but Billy and Angus didn’t look up from the geese.
A phone buzzed, Whatsapp messages were pinging about on the Goose group-chat. Other members of the group were reporting their sightings. Someone had been at the roost when they had flown in for the night, and another was there when they set off for the feeding grounds at 648am. He had noted the direction they flew in.
Billy took out his thermal imaging camera to show how it can easily pick up the geese as white pin pricks on the background.
“It means we can count the geese even in the dark on the roosts”, he said.
Billy showed me footage of thermal imaging video of the geese flying – video makes it far easier to count the geese as you just need to film the geese in the field and then can count them at home at your leisure and take stills from the video.
The Slamannan bean geese are literally followed by one or other member of the monitoring group from dawn until after dark.
It’s a tight knit community of goose watchers and on one occasion Angus got reports of a couple of men with dogs and a gun heading into the area, he drove down and heard a shot and called the Police. They didn’t come out so the next day he returned to the site, found a goose head and a shotgun cartridge. He bagged them up as evidence and took them to the police.
“I wore gloves – it was evidence of a crime” he said
“You’ve got to remember that I spent 35 years in prison” he jokes “I’ve done time!”
A car drove past and Angus went to speak to the driver. A couple of birders had come from Stirling to see the geese, “They are the only place to see Bean Geese in the UK now so we get a lot of people coming up trying to see them” Angus said. He explained that there used to be another flock that came to the Yare Valley in Norfolk, but the Norfolk flock had dwindled to only a few birds.
This flock are the descendants of the birds reintroduced to the Slamannan plateau in the 1980s. Eggs laid by birds in northern Sweden were taken and incubated under Canada geese and then the chicks reintroduced to the area. Billy explained that these geese are a completely separate population and breed in a separate place to the rest of the Taiga bean geese.
“These geese don’t actually breed in the Taiga” he said, they are south of it but the rest of the population breeds from Finland over to North east Russia. The birds in the furthest east of the population breed in China, and the Slamannan geese are the far western edge of the population.
It is the goose roosts that are protected by the designations of the SSSI and the SPA, signifying the international importance of the site, but they feed on the grassy fields and farmland east of the SPA. The bean geese are incredibly faithful to the Slamannan Plateau, never straying far until it’s time to migrate. Angus explained that one winter when snow was lying for a week they sat in one place and didn’t move until it melted. “They were melting the snow a bit with their bodies and eating a bit of grass” he said “ just conserving energy and stayed put”.
I wondered why they didn’t just fly to the coast, or even off the plateau to find fields where there wasn’t snow lying.
But this is something nobody knows– there must just be something special about Slamannan, if you’re a goose.
