Aberlady, East Lothian, 7am. Darkness drapes the quaint village high street. A local out buying his usual morning paper exchanges morning greetings with the shopkeeper, otherwise it's still, all quiet.

Turn the corner and the world opens up on the wide expanse of Aberlady Bay. And then it hits you: the noise - the noise of 29,000 wild geese roosting out in the bay. It is most definitely a noise rather than just a sound - it is loud, stunningly loud, an oscillating, reverberating hubbub, a cacophonous din.

The first peachy orange of an October morning appears in the eastern sky. The murmur of shapes in the half-light materialise into living, moving forms. There is a shockingly huge number of birds, so many as to actually make you gasp aloud. Scanning across the mudflats and the marsh, massed ranks of geese stretch to the sea.

The vast majority of them are pink-footed geese, smaller than the greylag and canada geese you'll see in the local park, fairly featureless grey-with-a-bit-of-brown, with darker heads and stubby beaks. Among them are a few barnacle geese - smaller, smarter than the rest, almost cute. In their neat black-and-white livery they strut Jeeves-like, hoity-toity amongst a sprawling mass of uncouth drunks.

'it is loud, stunningly loud,

an oscillating, reverberating hubbub, a cacophonous din'

These pinkfeet breed in Greenland and Iceland, and spend the winter on our shores. Some stay in Scotland, others head on to similarly goose-friendly places like the saltmarshes of north Norfolk. ‘Scottish’ barnacles breed in Greenland, and Svalbard in the high Arctic. They winter on Islay, and on the Solway Firth, where they are watched over by the RSPB. Both types of geese use set sites such as Aberlady as a stopover in the autumn, to gather for a feed-up, a catch-up. It's safety-in-numbers stuff, safe out on the mud free from foxes and us, but they are still scared. Most of them spend the night out in the bay, and depart in the morning, spreading out to spend the day feeding in fields a few miles inland.

Out in the midst is a lone white shape, a blob sticking out an absolute mile even in the dimmest light of dawn. It's a snow goose. The poor thing shouldn't really be here. It should be making its way south on the other side of the Atlantic, feeding up with millions of its kind on a plain in Dakota. Leaving it's breeding grounds in arctic Canada, it probably ran into a storm, lost its mate, got pushed east instead of south and fell in with pinkfeet migrating south. Who knows how long it will stay with this flock? Maybe next spring it will follow its instinct back west and find its mate again. Maybe it never will, condemned to spending its existence on the wrong side of the world. At least it's well looked after.

The flock sends out scouts to check all is safe, that no guns lie in wait, that it's ok for everyone to move off. A few birds up and fly, a few return. Then it happens. The flight is on. They're off. What looks like a section of land rises vertically into the air, metamorphosing into a gigantic flock of geese, a mass of flapping wings and agitated voices - "come on, let's go, we're off, yes, it's ok..." Hundreds, thousands of geese fly overhead, yelping, yapping as they head off into the sunrise.

There are fewer and fewer geese left. Some stay. When most have left, the bay is like a battlefield in a film, the morning after, the scene strewn with the fallen. There should be sombre music playing - strings. But they'll be fine. They'll fly back into the bay before dusk, appearing again in Vs and lines in the East Lothian skies like a scene from the Battle of Britain. And come spring they'll leave us for another year, heading back north once again to breed. So if you hear the sound of yapping overhead, see a straggly V in the clear blue sky one March morning, there may just be a lone white goose amongst them, looking for its way back home.