🗓️ 17th October 2025, Friday
⏰ 17:30 dinner 18:00 event start
🗺️The Stove Cafe, Dumfries
Hello Climate Kitcheners!
Our most recent event at the Stove…
✒️🪿🪽From Greenland to Galloway: Writing wild geese into the climate crisis.🪿🪽🖋
We were proud to be part of the wonderful Wild Goose Festival.
Led by David Borthwick, local academic and poet alongside local author Stephen Rutt, we focussed on the geese that no one notices, the Greenland White Fronted Geese.
We learned that while climate change has resulted in milder winters in some areas allowing species such as the familiar Barnies (Barnacle Geese) and Pinkies (Pink Footed Geese) to delay their Autumn migration and hang around on the mainland of Europe, White Fronted Geese have to face changes which are making it so much harder to successfully rear their goslings. Late Winter storms in their Greenland breeding grounds see snow covering the vegetation the adults need to recover from the long flight north and even causing nesting attempts to fail. While a ban on hunting initially saw a rise in the population of White Fronted Geese the adverse changes to climate in Greenland have caused their numbers to fall again.
Even when we try to protect a species here, we may be only part of the picture.
The challenging question is, “Are Greenland White Fronted Geese important?” There are 2 species of White Fronted Geese, one population breeds in Siberia, and “our” geese breed in Greenland, our geese have orange bills while Siberian geese have pink bills.
After we thought about this for a while we were given the challenge to write a piece of poetry or prose about an encounter with wildlife and how it made us feel, a tough and emotional task but Climate Kitchen folk were up to the challenge, and we ended the event with readings of some of the results. I’m told that one poem was even performed at a well-known local hostelry later on as well.
Now that Climate Kitchen has secured funding for the next few months, 🥳 we’re extremely chuffed to be able to offer a free plant based light supper again at all our events at The Stove. 🥣😋
We look forward to seeing you all again soon!✨