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Barnacle geese in Norfolk still surprise me. In my childhood, tiny numbers from the Siberian population visited, but only in the cruellest spells of winter. Even though I know that they breed in Norfolk now, seeing 700 of them over Holkham Park today is oddly jarring.

I hear them first, as I tiptoe past an angry pair of cheese-beaked greylags to admire a cherry plum in bloom. I register their breathy, barking calls. Ah yes, the barnacles are back.

Through the trees around the lake, I watch them tumbling noisily to land. They spill across the dandelion-dappled grass in yapping, energetic groups, the ganders barging barrel-bellied after one another. They are quite wonderful. Many of them are old acquaintances, for I was here in 2021 when they were ringed. A year before, as I researched a book on geese, Holkham’s senior warden, Andy Bloomfield, told me about the barnacles that had started nesting by the lake. Where, he wondered, had they come from? Where did they go in winter?

At the same time, an ornithologist friend, Kane Brides, asked us to help him ring these Norfolk-breeding geese for his study of British barnacles of captive origin. A plan was hatched. One dawn in July 2021, we herded the flightless, moulting Holkham flock on to the lake, where they were guided by canoeists into a corral. Altogether 400 birds were ringed that day, each also given a numbered Darvic ring – a criminal record, so to speak – allowing it to be monitored in the wild.

In August, their primary feathers regrown, they left. Within two days we learned where they had gone. They went, to take the air, presumably, to Southwold, 70 miles to the south-east. There they wintered with the breeding flock from Pensthorpe (also ringed), descendants of deliberate releases in the 1980s.

I love these chalk-faced, velvet-hooded birds. I love the neat black bills with which they pluck at Holkham’s March-sweet grass. Most of all, I love the quiet defiance of their genes. Transplanted by humans from the Arctic tundra of their ancestry, they stayed, and bred, and made a home. Now they belong, with us, in Norfolk.

• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com