News
Rising number of geese to be discussed
20/11/2009 08:46:00
The increasing number of greylag geese is being addressed at a meeting at Rennibister Farm, St Ola today, Thursday.
In recent years the problem has grown considerably and some claim that the numbers have increased by 1000% over the last three years. The geese are damaging and eating the crops. Sometimes the damage forces the farmers to reseed in some fields and it has delayed the cattle being able to graze in others.
According to one of the affected farmers, Al Watson, who runs
Rennibister with his parents, the problem isn't quite as big as it has
been at the moment. There has been a bit of culling by tourists lately.
Last week he had a group of Italian tourists on the farm who managed to
shoot 20-30 geese a day, but he's expecting the problems to pick up in spring: "By February, March they'll be eating all of the grass in some fields," he says.
This year hasn't been quite as bad as last year when they counted as
many as 2500 geese a day in one field. The average is about 600-700 a
day. The numbers decrease during the summer but pick up again in the
autumn.
"Lately I've been seeing some pink foot geese as well," Al says. He
finds this worrying since they're a new variety in these parts.
"They have been common further south in Aberdeenshire and in other
areas. There are around a 100,000 of them coming to winter in Britain
each year and if they start coming here in bigger numbers we've got a
serious problem."
Efforts to scare the geese with canes and attached streamers have
worked poorly. The geese were affected for little more than a three
weeks after which they simply returned to the fields and grazed
underneath the streamers.
Al Watson also mentions trying to scare the geese with gas guns, but
that only makes them move into adjacent field.
Scarecrows have also
worked poorly, saying: "Within a day they were grazing ten yards from
the scarecrow."
His view is that the problem with the geese is a general problem
affecting most Orcadian farmers. The geese come in such numbers that
when they graze they can empty a field or trample and ruin a crop. He
has seen estimates showing that six geese eat as much as a ewe.
Although most of the geese leave by late spring he has seen fields
recently sowed with barely in April being invaded by flocks of geese
who stay behind: "They get straight onto them and simply pick all the
seed out of the ground," he says.
Mike Girvan of the Scottish agricultural college has organised the
meeting. On the agenda are discussions led by the RSPB: on Geese in
Orkney, and the SNH, who wants to discuss the scare issue. Mike Girvan
wants an open discussion: "Is there a problem? I have the feeling it's
a small number of farmers being affected. I also heard that the greylag
geese normally scatter and graze. They don't concentrate in one area."
On the other hand the chairman of NFU Scotland's Orkney branch, Michael
Cursiter, sees the geese as a major problem.
"They seem to have become
resident. It's out of control. The efforts of bringing in Italian
tourists to shoot them don't seem to work. The numbers are still
growing," he says.