The geese flying south and the flocks of wild ducks are my childhood memories.

The hometown faces north, lives by the sea, and is located on the slope of the mountain.

When the ancestors first migrated, they should have been on the shore, but later they built a sea pond and surrounded some land, and to go to the sea, they had to pass through a rice field and then a cotton field (brackish land).

There is also a beach nearly 200 and a half deep outside the sea pond, and this cotton field and beach have become a must-stop for migratory birds when they pass by.

In winter, there are sporadic geese and wild ducks.

Fly away, batch after batch.

By the time the winter break is approaching, there are groups of people every day, and the number is staggering.

Wild ducks like to stay on the beach, where there are more small fish and shrimp, floating freely in the tide at high tide, and occasionally moving into the cotton fields in the sea pond.

Geese like to land in cotton fields.

At that time, the cotton has been harvested, there will be scattered cotton branches, the rows of soybeans planted are a finger high, the rows seem to be very dense from a distance, and the spacing between each plant is not small, enough for the geese to pass through it.

To this day, I don't know what geese eat.

But there are many kinds of weeds in the cotton fields, and the seeds of the withered yellow weeds are scattered on the ground.

There are ditches in the middle of the cotton field, called Huagou when I was a child, the water there is half light and half salty, which is very suitable for fish growth, and we often catch fish there in summer.

There are also many reptiles on the ground.

Since I was sensible, these wild geese and wild ducks that came south to spend the winter have never been protected.

Too many people want to turn them into a delicacy on the table.

Whenever this season, the cotton field will be sprinkled with pesticide rice, many of them eat by mistake, although they did not die on the spot, but they have no ability to take off to keep up with the flock of geese in the distance.

Wild ducks are even more miserable, sometimes dying in whole flocks on the beach, and it is not uncommon to see the elderly carrying dead ducks ashore.

I remember one year when my eldest brother got up early and picked up more than 10 dead ducks on the sea and sent them home, he couldn't finish eating them and sent some to his relatives' houses.

According to the current situation, dead ducks cannot be eaten, but at that time, we removed the internal organs and ate the duck meat as it was.

Because there is no money to buy meat in the countryside.

When I was a child, I would also go to the cotton fields to pick up wild ducks and geese with limited mobility.

Sometimes it looks like they don't know how to run off the list, but the small people often can't catch up and are escaped.

There were also shotguns to beat.

At that time, there was no control of shotguns, some of them were double-barreled, and when they walked to the flock of geese, they would fly together, and dozens of bullets (very small iron bullets) would always shoot down a few of them.

Some were not killed on the spot, but they were already injured and could not fly far.

It is common to see a herringbone team of geese, dragging a falling goose from a distance.

We know that the lone wild goose can't live.

In the 80s, the sea began to be reclaimed for farmland, and a sea pond was built outside the sea pond, and the sea was turned into a shrimp farm.

Cotton fields have also been converted into breeding farms.

Every winter, the farm becomes an abandoned mud pond, and there is no longer a place for wild ducks and geese to come and go in winter, but there is also a lack of killing and blood awakening.

In recent years, we have carried out large-scale coastal development, rows of high-rise factories have been built on the beach, and large wharves have been built on the seaside.

I miss the days when there were wild geese.

I want to follow the footsteps of the wild geese.

How are you?!