During my fieldwork visit to Ny-Alesund I got to join Maarten Loonen, Mo Verhoeven and their team on a boat trip to the island Storholmen. The island is situated in Kongsfjorden, just outside Ny-Alesund, and part of a bird sanctuary. The aim was to observe and monitor ringed barnacle geese, which required some strategic thinking about how we landed on the island and walked around it. We needed to get the geese to move in the right direction, instead of heading out to sea. As a plant- and landscape ecologist, this was very new for me, but Maarten and Mo seem to be able to “think like geese”. But even so the geese seemed to prefer staying on the water that day. Trying to be a useful assistant I followed instructions on where to walk and stand, noted down a few ring codes, but in the end I think I was most useful as a photo reporter…