He shoots, he scores

Wildfowling using a football formula bags a home win at Burghley for Jamie Tusting

- Jamie Tusting

I passed the ball wide and made a run-in to the box. In came the cross and I got a hefty boot to it, sending it soaring over the bar. As I looked up and watched the ball clear the fence behind the goal, I saw another skein of geese.

I stopped and gazed, recalling evenings past, hunkered on the foreshore waiting for noisy distant greylags to drift closer. This was the third week in a row that geese had flown over the football pitch, in vast skeins of 50 or 60 all the way down to pairs and trios. They seemed to be following more or less the same flightpath, perhaps heading for Rutland Water a few miles away.

I returned to my game of football, yet more dodgy passes and poor shots; the rain fell all evening and I think we lost 2-0. My mind was elsewhere. Burghley Lake, sitting a little over a mile from where we were playing, was almost certainly the source of the greylag. I knew from my dog walks and work in Burghley Park that there were plenty of geese around, grazing on the lawns of the Elizabethen house and across the wider grassland of the park.

Flightline

When I got home after football, I dug out an old Ordnance Survey map of the area and carefully traced the flightline back from the football pitches towards the lake. The map is one I’ve had for a few years and is annotated with little scribbles; crosses marking the spots of fish I’ve caught, notes of curious trees or good spots for a morning deer stalk. Sure enough, it seemed the geese were tracking down the length of the lake and out across Stamford.

After a day of wholesome activities, including watching England dismantle Argentina at the Rugby World Cup and an afternoon beating for a local pheasant shoot, my partner Cynthia and I headed from my house towards the western end of the lake, just as the gloaming arrived.