In early December last year, I was snuggled into a hedge in Norfolk — if you could describe my nest of blackthorn and bramble as snuggly. The geese — some greylags but mostly pinkfeet — had been feeding hard on the adjacent sugar beet stubble for 10 days but had pretty much cleared the lot.
This was evident from my recce the previous morning, when the geese had swung wide of my patch’s operations and headed to the out-of-bounds neighbouring land, where the beet had been harvested three days before. But there was still a chance to pull in a bird or two, or so I told myself as I set out half a dozen decoys in the dark before creeping back into my
