Country diary: pink-footed geese sing the wind's own song

Claxton, Norfolk: It was as if the field had uprooted and their calls were the landscape itself in full clamourOn any walk to the marsh I'm always struck how, with a single click of the closing door, the entire audible routine of the house interior - the ticking clock, the even hum of the central heating and fridge, the slow breathing of all that other civilised stuff - is washed away instantly by the sound tide of the outdoors.What we perhaps require as animals is release from that atmospheric certainty. Being outdoors permits an immersion in the unending and endlessly unpredictable music of nature, which the musician and naturalist Bernie Krause, in his book The Great Animal Orchestra, calls the "biophony". Perhaps it is this that restores the default settings of our species. We have been attuned to the Earth's wild song for 100,000 generations; why should we cease to want or need it after just 10 spent mainly indoors? Continue reading...