Geese, guns and ghosts: Following the barnacle goose along the Solway Firth

Keywords: avian, birds, Anthropocene, infrastructure, military, place, multispecies
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

By the end of the Second World War, the Svalbard barnacle goose population had dwindled to a couple of hundred individuals. Flying in from the Arctic to spend the winters on the Solway Firth (the estuary that separates England from Scotland), she was a favourite target of wildfowlers in the area. Since then, a ban on shooting and the Solway goose management scheme that pays farmers to maintain a goose friendly habitat has seen the barnacle goose numbers massively increase. Today, an uneasy truce has formed between conservationists, farmers and wildfowlers who have different and often conflicting interests in the goose. Adding to that is the Solway’s rich military history: once host to huge munitions factories during WW1 and WW2, this now derelict infrastructure of war curates the tidal landscape through awkward access zones, barbed wire fences and secretive burial sites.

Environmental military history and geography usually concerns itself with the environmental effects of battlegrounds and warzones. In this paper I argue that the military infrastructure of the Solway, particularly that of the explosive propellants produced in the factories, have left resonances that not only inflect the land itself, but also the trajectory of the barnacle goose. Explosive propellants are used in different ways by the goose’s stakeholders: cannon nets by conservationists, bird bangers by farmers, and explosive shot by wildfowlers. This complex scenario produces a particular military landscape: not one of battlefields, but rather of a spatiality that organises goose life along the flyway.