One of the joys of winter is hearing geese honking conversationally to each other as they descend to their roosting sites at twilight. I used to hear Canada geese sail overhead to a Stoke Newington reservoir behind where I lodged in my London days. In Norfolk, the great skeins of pink‑footed geese that congregate on the marshes at Holkham are a wonder of the natural world.

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Our rapidly changing climate is helping many wild geese to thrive – but one subspecies is not. The Greenland white-fronted goose is a Celtic specialist which flies from western Greenland to enjoy the mild winters of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. I’m not being ironic: the bogs of western Britain and Ireland don’t freeze as they do in Scandinavia, so the geese can devour the roots of marshy plants on which they depend.

Unfortunately, as a world expert in these birds, professor Tony Fox of Aarhus University, explains, numbers have almost halved since 1999 because warmer Atlantic temperatures have deflected spring weather fronts north to Greenland, causing snowfalls in April and May, just when the geese arrive there to breed. Late snow reduces food and a hungry goose produces fewer viable eggs.

This species is protected everywhere it lives – except England and Wales. They were once widespread in Wales, now there are just 21 birds left, on the Dyfi Estuary. Fox praises wildfowling clubs which have voluntarily agreed not to shoot them but the Welsh government has so far refused to give this rare bird legal protection. There’s a new public consultation and people should get involved. They should at least raise a honk.

And best paper role goes to …

I appreciated a starring role by another endangered species at the weekend: the newspaper. Michael Caine and Jane Fonda are splendid in the film Youth, but my gong for best supporting actor would go to Caine’s unrumpled sidekick, the Guardian.

At first, I was suspicious. Caine plays a curmudgeonly composer who spends much of a holiday in a Swiss spa leafing through the Guardian. Both Caine and the resort have seen better days. What is director Paolo Sorrentino saying about our lovely paper?

Worse was to come, the Guardian looms large in the film’s most tragic scene in what resembles a sinister piece of negative product placement by our rivals. If Caine had been an Independent reader, Youth would now make a pertinent point about extinction but, according to Sorrentino, it was Caine’s personal choice to peruse the Guardian. This must be the most gratifying actorly embrace of the paper since Paddy Considine told me he had to “wimp down” to become a Guardian reporter in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Brandishing a newspaper will always be a superior cinematic symbol to scrolling through a smartphone. Like onscreen smoking, it is too expressive to lose. Caine’s Guardian reader may be decrepit and disillusioned but still oozes wit and discerning taste. I suspect that newspapers will not die for the same reason as cinema survives: on a good day, both remain a supreme pleasure.

Season’s strange greetings

Matthew Oates (@NTMatthewOates) Near Stroud, Cotswolds, today. My earliest ever... OMG! pic.twitter.com/7JcARlS5GM

Daffodils in south Devon think it’s April: they are over already. A flowering bluebell on the Cotswolds believes that Valentine’s Day falls in May. In my part of the world, it is sleeting but a hollyhock is budded, poised to flower, as if it were July. This cold snap will be a relief for everyone hoping for a return to phenological norms. Wild animals and plants are fiendishly adaptable but, as our own disorientation – and the plight of the Greenland white-fronted goose – shows, some species are more adaptable than others.