Comfort in sound

I was lying awake in the small hours of Tuesday, the window open, and I heard the incessant chatter of a skein of pink-footed geese flying south low over the house.  They are returning for the winter, the first arrivals from Iceland or Greenland.  A familiar sound, and a comforting reminder of the continuity of life through the seasons.

This photograph, of course, depicts something different, a heron in the Kent estuary as the sun set.  This bird, in contrast to the geese, probably bred less than 4 miles from here, yet it too has seasonal patterns in its movements with birds become increasingly common in this part of the estuary as summer gives way to autumn.

In between the geese and the heron we spent our allotted two hours in Lancaster, a large machine span and scanned while the injected dye flushed hot in odd places.  Time to remember the comforting sounds of nature.

This morning (Wednesday), the BBC's tweet of the day was coincidentally the pink footed goose, or perhaps not so coincidentally as the broadcast was perfectly timed to coincide with the first arrivals back on our estuaries.