Richard Collins: From Iceland to Ireland for our wild geese 

Around October, Icelandic greylags fly 1,300km directly across the ocean to Ireland. They have been doing so for millennia

A greylag goose goes for an afternoon stroll by the Lough in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane

“Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide”

When the Treaty of Limerick was signed in October 1691, the ‘wild geese’ remnants of Patrick Sarsfield’s Jacobite army set sail for mainland Europe, never to return. Yeats’ ‘grey wing’ belonged to a goose which lags behind other geese at migration time — the ‘greylag’.