 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 29th meeting of the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee in 2022. Before we begin, can I remind those committee members using electronic devices to switch them to silent? Our first item of business this morning is an evidence session on petition PE1490, control of wild goose numbers, which has been lodged by Patrick Kraus on behalf of the Scottish Crofting Federation. I'm pleased to welcome to the meeting Ray Mackenzie, Policy and Operations Manager, NatureScot and Morag Miln Wildlife Policy Officer, NatureScot. Before we begin and the first question will go to Finlay Carson, can I just ask for an update on where we are in terms of the five-yearly review into goose management in Scotland? If you could set the scene regarding that place, asking our witnesses, would Ray or Morag like to respond? I can do that. At the moment, we are in the middle of the five-year review. We started off doing a consultation with stakeholders and that consultation period finished just under two weeks ago. We had 257 responses to that consultation across most of the goose areas and, apparently, most of the goose stakeholders. It was an anonymous questionnaire. We are currently working through all the information that we have got back and trying to look at the key areas and themes in terms of what the stakeholders are looking for in goose policy going forward. Thank you for that. Can you give an indication of when it might be completed? The aim is to complete a report for the minister by spring 2023. Once we have got the themes sorted out in terms of what we have got back, we have a lot of data to work through, we will go back to the local goose management groups and make sure that we have the bulk of what they are saying to us correct and write a draft report and then throw that altogether in a report for the minister in early in the new year. That is helpful. Thank you for that. Can I go to Finlay Carson for his questions? Thank you, deputy convener, and thank you for joining us this morning. Back in April, you responded to the committee's session that we had with the petitioner. You noted that, over the past two years, the shooting effort has probably been reduced because of Covid. That might make it difficult to assess the impact on reducing goose numbers, but we have also had the awful outbreak of avian flu. Can you tell me whether you are going to have to make predictions on future goose numbers, which might be affected by the Covid impact and shooting effort, but will also potentially reduce the number of geese because of avian flu? I will take the avian flu question and then pass it to Morag for the Covid question, because we are both working in slightly different areas. Avian influenza has hit the Sallbard barnacle goose population in the Solway really, really hard. From early November last year through to March, it was estimated that 13,200 geese had died from a population of just under 40,000, so around a third of that population were lost. In other goose populations, the Greenland barnacle goose population, which is distributed around the west coast on Islay and into Ireland, it was estimated that around 2,700 birds had been lost avian flu, 1,700 in Islay and 1,700 in Ireland and around 1,000 in Islay. In terms of the other goose populations, Grey lags, there were cases recorded across the country, maybe around 60 or 70 cases, but no real concentrations of die off and with pink-footed goose much the same, apart from maybe a small concentration of die off in Fintorn in the spring just before they left to go north for migration. In terms of what might happen, we are working with not an awful lot of information about how this might affect wild populations. This is absolutely unprecedented. Bird flu has circulated for quite a long time, but the scale of the impacts on geese and, as you will be aware, on seabirds over the summer has been pretty significant in some places. In terms of predicting what might happen, we have set up a loose framework of people who are out and about anyway doing various things, whether it be our nature reserve staff, RSVB wardens, bird observers in some places, to try and get an early warning of what is going on when birds come back and we can test and monitor. However, because it is affected by different populations in different ways, it is really difficult to predict what might happen. We do not know why the Solway population was affected so badly, yet the Greenland population, which are essentially the same geese and the Greenland barnacle population, were not affected in just as badly. In the Solway, grey lag and pink-footed geese were not affected in any way or near the same scale, so it is pretty difficult to predict. As geese are coming back from migration and we are pulling in account data, we will have a better idea of what birds have made it to the breeding grounds and come back and we will be able to look at things over the next few weeks in terms of productivity and numbers coming back. That is where we are. In terms of management, we are working with a task force of various agencies and a lot of expertise. I am pulling together a plan going forward, a Scottish plan going forward, to try and better understand and manage the outbreak in wild birds. I will pass over to Morag for the Covid question, she will know more about the figures. Morag, do you want to pick that up? Thank you. In terms of Covid, it is very likely to have had a big impact on the number of birds taken through sport shooting. I cannot tell you exactly how much, because we do not have bag numbers coming in through sport shooting. I cannot tell you that the number of grey lag birds has recovered their numbers since 2017. Their numbers have gone up at the sites where we regularly count them, the four adaptive management pilot sites and the numbers recovered on the western Isles since 2017. That is likely to have been in part due to Covid. The reduced amount of shooting that has happened during the restrictions. Finlay, does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. That is a comprehensive answer. It is interesting to hear what has just been said about grey lag goose numbers. As I live in the Isle of Louis, I will declare a sort of an interest that I am not a crofter. I am where I live, surrounded by grey lag geese and surrounded by comment on them. I wonder if you can say a bit more just so that the committee can have a picture of grey lag goose numbers. What has changed about their migration patterns and about their numbers and also about the impact that is had on agriculture, but particularly the kind of agriculture that supports wider habitats for a wider number of species? I am finding it difficult working out who is doing what here. Grey lag numbers have increased substantially. The resident population of grey lag numbers has increased substantially over the past 20-25 years and in particular at certain sites. That is because of the numbers increasing and the patterns of migration have changed so that the numbers of migratory Icelandic grey lag geese that spend the winter with us, more of them have spent their winter on Orkney than in previous years. Over the last 20 or so, we have had an increase in the numbers of grey lag throughout Scotland and in particular in some places. Do you want to add to that? We do not have systematic counts of resident grey lag across the country and it seems to be that the resident grey lags are causing most of the issues. The Icelandic grey lags come into Orkney and very north of Scotland, but on the islands there are very much resident grey lags. Their productivity is high. On the islands there are not too many natural predators and there is probably something connected to things such as climate change and so on that has allowed them to breed incredibly well. In terms of the numbers, in the places where we are carrying out management, we have a good idea of the overall numbers because we carry out counts in those places, but in the rest of Scotland we do not, and they are increasing just about everywhere. Just to follow up on that, I am keen to have your comments on the impact on not just agriculture but the wider environment. My understanding from looking around me is that grey lag geesers are pulling up to spoiling areas of agricultural land. They are pulling up grass, but they are also making areas ungrasable, if that is a word, for a long time after they have collectively decided to visit. My question is if the method of controlling this, for the reasons that we are all talking about, both agricultural and environmental, is primarily going to be shooting, how do we address the fact that in communities where agriculture is part time, how do we address the fact that we are going to need significant numbers of shooters to deal with this problem? There is no dispute that geese cause serious agricultural damage and, in particular, as Ray has said, grey lags are a problem. Certainly, the main method for controlling resident grey lag geese has been through shooting. Some egg oiling takes place, but shooting is the main method. On the western aisles, where we have supported demonstration projects to see if it is possible to control resident grey lag birds, maintain their conservation interests and reduce agricultural damage. The traditional methods of shooting and egg oiling have been successful in reducing their numbers to about half over a short period, over a five-year demonstration project. That was not possible on Orkney. The numbers of resident grey lag birds are much higher, so to reduce their numbers, a greater number needed to be taken. There was a shorter period in which to work, because to focus attention on taking resident birds, the reduction cull was taken during the summer early autumn months, when the Icelandic birds were not present. Orkney farmers worked hard but could not reduce the number of resident grey lag birds using traditional methods. They managed almost to contain the numbers between 20, 25,000 birds, but they were not able to reduce the numbers. Over the past two or three years, we have worked with Orkney farmers to see whether we can use coralline as an additional control method, and that has worked well. The Orkney local goose management group has put forward a plan to achieve a reduction cull using a combination of traditional methods, shooting, egg oiling and coralline. It is a method of taking malt birds that are sitting on locks, spending time on locks while they are in malt, so that they do not fly and spend time on the locks. They gather together in July all this time on the locks in malt, and the birds are gently shepherded using kayaks to take them off the water and on to land, using sheep pens into a funnel, and then they are dispatched on land. That is helpful to understand what was meant. I move to questions from Ariane Burgess, please. You may have already answered my question, but I will come at it at a slightly different angle and see what comes out of it. The Scottish Crofting Federation wrote about the damage that wild geese can cause to high-nature value land and world-renowned biodiversity on crofts and farms in crofting areas. I appreciate your professional opinion on how much of the land on crofting areas is high-nature value and world-renowned biodiversity. Given that, in the Biodiversity and Tachness Index, Scotland is sadly 28th from the bottom out of over 200 countries. That is one part, and this is the bit where you may have answered it. I also appreciate your opinion on whether further reductions in wild geese populations is the best way to protect and enhance biodiversity in those areas, or if other measures may be either more effective or should be taken alongside goose management programmes. Who would like to kick off with that one? We appreciate that crofting is a very important method of supporting, not just delivering agriculture and agricultural produce but also biodiversity. Healthy crofting systems will support biodiversity. I do not have figures on the amount of crofting land and the amount of diversity that it supports with me. Simply, it is really very important in terms of supporting biodiversity. The control of geese is important in terms of helping to keep those crofting systems going, but it is obviously only one of many challenges that crofting faces. Do you have anything to add to that? I agree with Morag that crofting supports a range of biodiversity, and that might be different on different islands and on different locations, but it is very much a case that geese are only one issue. If we can contribute towards dealing with the goose issue, then hopefully that provides a good contribution to dealing with the wider issues and support that crofting needs. In terms of national and international importance and biodiversity, we could provide you with some information on designated sites, not that, so we can give you areas of marker or sites designated for breeding bird populations or so on that are important in the crofting areas. Before we move to questions from Jenny Minto, Finlay Carson has got a supplementary question. Thank you, convener. It has been so long since I have joined remotely, I forgot how to intervene. It is back to the question about coralling. We understand that the estimated population of 1,500 grey-lagged geese in 2001 increased to 26,500 from 2001 to 2021. My understanding is that coralling involves putting them into sheet pens and then injecting them to humanely put them down. What is the cost per goose for doing that? I will continue with the question, because that goose is then not fit to go into the food chain or whatever and the caraxies have got to be disposed of. Can you outline roughly what the cost per bird for coralling and dispatching these geese in, for example, just and ornally alone? Ray, do you want to start off with that? I think that that would be more like a one-sheet tube, not with a coralling cry out, sorry. Okay, I will go to more like that. The coralling is expensive compared to traditional methods. I don't have the exact figures in the order of £30 per goose for coralling. Overall, the cost per goose is taken over the period that we have supported grey-lagged control since 2012. The cost per goose has been approximately between £10 and £20 per goose. It varies for each of the four different sites, and that is all the money that has been spent on supporting goose control. It includes the cost of monitoring, the cost of developing the coralling method, as well as support for shooting, for egg-oiling and for coralling. The cost of coralling is more expensive than the other methods, but it has been found to be needed on Orkney. Okay, just on that basis, the fact that only £50,000 is put forward to control grey-lagged geese. If we are looking at nearly a £25,000 bird increase on Orkney, £50,000 is not going to go very far. It is going to be more than spent on Orkney alone without looking at any other islands on the west coast. It puts £50,000 into perspective as being a drop in the ocean and what might be required to control geese numbers. Can I give you the number of the amount of money that has been spent over the period that we have been supporting grey-lagged control? We have supported grey-lagged control since 2012. The demonstration pilots ran from 2012 until 2017. After that, we had hoped that, because they were set up as short-term demonstration projects, we would hope that local goose groups would be able to control geese themselves. That has not been the case. Funding has continued after that. In total, the amount of money that NatureScot and Scottish Government have spent on those four demonstration sites has been £520,000 to date. By spring 23, we will have spent the remaining £25,000 of that Government support that you were talking about. That would bring the total to £575,000. I can give you a breakdown of how much was spent at each of the four sites. By 2023, on the US, the total will be £209,565 on Orkney, £204,000 and £527,000. On Tyree and Lewis, where the numbers of geese are smaller, £61,000, £61,312 on Tyree and £99,926 on Lewis. It is a bit more than the £50,000 that the minister offered last February. I think that you were asking me as well about the cost of the coralling. It has been more expensive because we have been developing that method. Obviously, when you are doing something new, you take extra precautions. We brought contractors up from England who had experience of using coralling as a method for controlling, particularly Canada geese in parks, but that is part of their work. We brought up somebody to give advice and to help with the Malt survey and to do some of the work. We hope that, with the experience that we have gained, local people will be able to take on that work and will have developed the skills that are necessary. In the future, there will be some economies that we can make in that way. The other thing is that you mentioned lethal injection. We used that method and we had vets present to comment on the animal welfare aspects of the work and to make sure that it was done with animal welfare in mind. However, we have also found that manual dispatch is also efficient at the coralling. There are choices to be made and, probably, economies to be made in that particular method. We have a supplementary from Rachel Hamilton. It was just to get a little bit more detail on the letter that Patrick Chrysd sent. I am not sure if you have seen it more, but in the last paragraph he said that financial support has to be more equitable. For example, Eilor's geese management scheme has a budget of around £1 million per year, but, from the figures that you have just given, that does not really equate in my head. I wonder whether you can explain what that budget has covered, because you have just talked there about the people who are expertise in coralling coming up from England and other methods that possibly needed more expertise. Just in comparison, he says that used receives zero amount directly from NatureScot, so it is just how that funding is broken down and how it could be equitable. The work that I am describing is about control for resident grey lag geese. We have on-going long-term schemes that are for more highly protected geese, annex 1 under the birds directive, where there are more restrictions applied to farmers and crofters in terms of what they can do to protect their crops. Since 2000, we have supported a range of schemes to help farmers to host those birds and to pay for compensation for the impacts that the birds have. The annual budget for those six schemes at the moment is £1.3 million. It is completely different in terms of scale, and that is because we have had a direction from the national goose policy to focus our resources to species of greatest conservation need. We have long-term series of schemes to support the management of annex 1 species. The resident grey lag work that we did was relatively small-scale demonstration projects that were intended to be short-term demonstration projects. It is different in scale, different in the species and the provisions that we are making through the different schemes. To continue on that, my colleague Ariane Burgess asked a question about the high-nature value land and biodiversity. You have just mentioned looking at the funding, depending on what needs to be protected in terms of that value. We did not describe it as such, but Patrick Crouse describes it as such. I wondered how NatureScot came up with the criteria. Is it based on the number of geese predicted in the count, or is it based on the loss of value of the crop, or is it based on the loss of value of biodiversity? Bearing in mind that, in your previous answer, you said that it was not based on high-nature value, is there some contradiction there? The basis for payments are completely different for the two types of support that we give. The basis for payments for the annex one species is about it fits with state aid. The money that is given is payment for additional costs incurred and payments for profit for gone, and it fits the state aid rules. Money is paid to farmers, to the individuals who are supporting the geese, who are hosting the geese. That is to support the population of geese and to support the farming that they impact. The payments that have been made for the adaptive management pilots and demonstration pilots are not to individual farmers, therefore, for particular activity. They are to support the control of a population and to reduce the size of the population. The four sites that were selected for those demonstration pilots are sites where there were particularly high concentrations of resident grey-like geese or high densities. They are sites where the local geese management group applied to join the demonstration projects. There are a couple of local groups who were eligible and chose not to come into the demonstration project. The money does not go to the individual farmers at all. It goes for the activity of shooting. It is organised slightly differently in each of the four demonstration pilots. Essentially, the money pays for the coordination of work, linking farmers who want control to happen with shooters who are willing to shoot on most of the sites as volunteer shooters on UIS. It is mostly through paid marksmen. For co-ordination, for ammunition, those are the main costs. It is for an activity, and it goes to meet the costs of delivering that particular activity. It is not a payment to the individual farmers. I may have missed something there, so Ray may wish to add. I am just waiting on my microphone coming back on. There are a couple of things to add to that. More on how we manage grey-lags as opposed to how we manage hecti-species such as barnacle geese and greenland whitefronted geese. In some of the crofting areas, the £1.3 million budget does not all go to ILA. There are six schemes in ILA, Stollway, Tyriencall, Entire and South Walls and Uist. There are three crofting areas that we have schemes for managing barnacle geese in the same way as we do on ILA. They are focused on the areas where barnacle geese are causing serious agricultural damage and the farmers are very limited in what they can do to air and manage those geese. There is quite a big difference in terms of how grey-lags can be shot these days all year round. They are quarry species in the winter and they are on a general licence the rest of the year. Farmers can shoot them to prevent damage. With protected species, it is much more difficult for them to do that, hence the difference in the two approaches. It is not just ILA that gets the larger payments for barnacle geese. IRECO, Uist and South Walls are all within crofting areas. The areas that are intensively managed tend to attract the barnacle geese and there are payments made to farmers on the same or similar basis to those on ILA. We can move now to questions from Jenny Minto. Thank you to Ray and Moira for joining us. I, like Alasdair Allan, have a constituency that is impacted by the geese with both ILA and Tyree sitting in my constituency. Ray and I often meet on Cullhome and Beach while walking our dogs. I can attest to the number of seabirds that were sadly washed up on ILA's shores during the bird flu situation. Morag, in your answers to my colleague Rachel Hamilton, you have gone into some of the questions that I was hoping to ask. I am interested to hear about the differences because, as you have both said, not every situation is the same across the four pilot areas. What are the major differences across the four pilot areas and what have you learnt and what have the communities learnt from the work that has been done? There is a difference between Orkney and the Western Isles. There is a big difference on Orkney. The resident grey-lag population of about 25,000 birds—I am talking rough figures and round figures—is joined by a migratory grey-lag population of about 47,000 birds. During the demonstration projects, we have supported the control of the resident grey-lag population at a time—mostly during summer early autumn—at a time when the migratory birds were not present. That meant that every bird shot was a resident bird. That is really important because it was the resident birds that were causing particular difficulties by stripping barley crops and flattening the crops and making it difficult to harvest. It was not possible for the Orkney farmers to reduce the size of the resident population, even though they worked really hard, because there is a much bigger population on Orkney to deal with. If you compare that to the Western Isles, they have a longer period over which they can control birds. They are not joined by the large numbers of Icelandic birds, so they were able to control birds and to choose the time when they controlled them. They still had particular problems with the resident grey-lags taking barley and just traditional crofted crops. The numbers are much smaller. We are looking at fewer than 10,000 birds at each of those sites. At the end of the pilot, the latest counts were about 3,000 birds on Tyrian call, 4,000 birds Lewis and Harris, 7,000-8,000 birds on U.S., as compared to the 24,000 birds on Orkney. At each of the Western Isles sites, during the pilot five years maximum, local goose management groups were able to reduce their populations by roughly half, but since Covid numbers have recovered. Is there anything specifically that you have learned from the trials about the best way to manage the geese, because you have talked about the egg oiling and the shooting? I was also interested—you commented—that some goose management groups decided not to be involved in the pilots. Why was that? The main things that we learned were that local groups can control resident birds if they take action soon enough. Leaving it until the numbers have reached Orkney magnitude means that local farmers have great difficulty in controlling the act soon. I have been approached by other groups with issues with grey lags in caithness and in space-side recently, and we encourage them to control the birds early. If they have particular problems, they are going to consider control to do it early. If they take action early, traditional methods can be successful, but it takes continued effort. If they relax, if they let up, then numbers will recover. We learned that numbers could be controlled without jeopardising the population, and local groups could do that. They could take the carcasses and sell them without jeopardising the population. That was a concern before we allowed that to happen and before we licensed that. Those are our main lessons. Morag Ray, have you got anything to add to Morag's points? I think that I can add some detail on the Isla situation in particular. The Isla group back in 2012 put in events to join the pilot situation. They decided that, given the amount of money that was offered and the various constraints that would have been placed on them around numbers and how things were done, they felt that they were better off working themselves to deliver grey lag management. At that point, it was becoming an increasing issue, because there was an increased amount of barley growing on Isla. Demand from the distilleries meant that quite a lot of Isla farmers were growing increased areas of barley. They decided to go alone, with the support of the distilleries, to try and manage grey lag. They were relatively successful in shooting quite a lot of geese. One of the things that we are seeing here now is that the extent of barley is quite significant on Isla in the autumn. Farmers are still shooting a lot of grey lags, and the numbers right that work being done are continuing to rise in the autumn. What it looks like to us is that the numbers are very low by the time we get to the spring. We count the grey lags all winter when we are doing the barnacle goose counts, and the numbers decline over the winter, and we are left with around 600 birds in the spring, reduced from around 3,000-4,000 in the autumn. That is telling us that the management of grey lag on Isla is creating a sink for birds to come in from Northern Ireland, mainland, Argyll, Mal, and other islands. The increase in grey lag all around is causing an additional problem for the Isla farmers. They certainly put in a lot of effort to manage the grey lags, but if other people in different places do not see a need for management and do not do it, that can impact. Although we are dealing with resident grey lag birds, they do move about in the country at key times for key feeding opportunities. As I said, the Isla farmers have been really, really quite proactive and done a really good job in terms of what they are trying to do, but they have had industry support to do it. I made just one final question, which I think I will direct to you as well. Can you, just for the record, explain the difference between Annex 1 and Annex 2? Those are first directive listings. Annex 1 is highly protected and can only be managed and shot under licence and the licences for very specific reasons and the one that we would be using. It is for reasons of public health, air safety and, in our case, it prevents serious agricultural damage. Any licence has to go through quite a rigorous assessment before it can be issued. Annex 2 species are quarry species, so there is a season generally in the winter for shooting of quarry species. At other times of year, we can and were for grey lags issuing licences in ways that we were doing for some barnacle geese in some places, but for the last three years, we have been on the general licence, which means that we do not have to ask farmers and crofters to apply for a licence so that they can shoot to prevent serious agricultural damage. It is one of the tools that we are trying to put in place to help with the management side of things and to make life a bit easier for people who are suffering damage and need to manage geese. Just on the point that was raised by Morag Milne, she was alluding to the licensing of the meat from grey lag geese, if I picked her up rightly. Has part of the issue been in the past that I realise that we are never going to sell all the meat that results from the shooting of grey lag geese in the short term? Nonetheless, goose burgers are very nice, I can confirm. Has part of the problem not been that the licensing of the sale of the meat has been done on quite a short term or sporadic basis that has not encouraged businesses to be able to exploit that market and make something of it? That has been an issue. We would love for every carcass that is taken to be sold, eaten and used. We have tried our best to make it possible for people to sell and to give assurance that sale will be continued. Whilst the UK was part of the EU, we sought European approval for our proposals. On the basis that the take was controlled, it was part of an adaptive management project so that the numbers of birds were known, the numbers that were taken were known, there were regular counts and the bag that was taken as part of the adaptive management bag was adjusted each year in light of the count data and the impacts that the project was having on the local population. Since Brexit, we have put sale on to our general licence 15 and we allow sale through that. Through the pilot process, we have regularly asked for the EEC's approval for what we were doing. There has been some uncertainty from time to time as to whether it was going to continue and I appreciate that that has possibly had an impact on whether people were able to invest in sale. I want to come back to Ray. Ray, can I come back to you just purely on a practical thought process that went through my head while you were speaking to Jenny Minto? If you have Annex 1 and Annex 2 birds, I presume that they do not fly separately. They are in the same flock. How do the shooters make sure that they are shooting Annex 2 only? Are they doing it? Were I fully doing it with shotgun? We do not tend to fly in the same flock and we do not tend to graze next up in fields. They can do, but not very often. Where you have different species, they tend to be in different parts of the field, different species have different preferences for what they are looking for in the fields of barnacle geese, such as the short green, very improved grass, and we will graze on that. Gray lags and white fronts, for example, might be grazing in some of the longer, more tusky grass at times. It is not often that they are mixed up. The shooting is done while the birds are on the ground. It is not like wild fowling where the shooting birds are coming off the roost. Generally, the species, although they can be in the same sort of places in the can mix, on the ground, you can see what they are shooting at. Anybody shooting a goose for any reason should be able to see what they are shooting at. They do use shotguns and rifles. Obviously, the choice of what type of gun they use is down to the judgment of the marksman or the shooter at the time and whether or not they are able to take a shot that will target only the species they are after. On Eila, where barnacle geese are shot under licence, there are restrictions on shooting at if there are other species in the flock. Anybody who is firing a gun needs to know what they are shooting at. Any skilled marksman will know what they are shooting at. They will be pretty sure of hitting only what they are after. The other thing that shows you my knowledge of geese, despite the fact that they have been burnt from watching all my life, is why is this predominantly an island and a west coast problem? I live over the flight path of Loch Leven, grazing grounds for geese in vast numbers, but I have no constituency issues. People contact me saying that we need to get to these grey-like geese. Why is there such a particular problem? We grow molten barley in Persia, by the way. Why are there no problems in the mainland, in the same way as there seems to be in the west coast of the island? I think probably mostly what you are saying around Loch Leven will be think-footed geese. Surprisingly, despite the fact that they are massively our biggest goose population that comes in, we are talking the tens of thousands for the other geese that come in. We are talking half a million think-feet coming into Britain and quite a lot of them remaining in Scotland over the winter. They tend to feed on stubbles. They come in after the barley has been harvested, and anything like sugar beet down in the south-east of England and so on. They tend to feed on spent fields, if you like, and do not appear to cause the damage that the geese that are wintering on grass or the resin geese going into the barley. That is not to say that there are not grey-legs in different places that are increasing in number. As more mentioned, people in stress pay and Kate Ness are starting to say that they are having problems. Pinkfeet are a quarry species. There is a lot of interest in goose shooting of pinkfeet. Farmers can get shooting parties in over the winter. For the majority of the time pinkfeet are here, they can be managed and scared off and shot and so on. Again, it is a behavioural thing. In terms of why the west coast and why the concentrations in the west coast are things like barnacle geese, it is very much proximity of salt marsh, roosting areas, feeding areas. Up and down the west coast, you have quite a lot of salt marsh, but even smaller areas of salt marsh are close to improved fields. That is what they are looking for. If you go anywhere along barnacle migration routes in Iceland or with the Spalberg geese in north-east Europe, north-west Europe, you see something that looks very similar to what we look for in Scotland. It is to do with habitat, feeding habitat and proximity of appropriate roosting areas nearby. Obviously, the west coast has got quite a lot of that sort of thing, whereas the east coast is a bit different. Okay, thank you very much, yours that I didn't recognise. Is there a lot of legs either? I have a couple of questions. Just in terms of where geese populations are found, I am hearing from constituents in Shetland that they are becoming an increasingly damaging issue. What was put to me was that they are eating a huge portion of grass needed for pregnant or nursing use at an increasing expense to the crofter and farmer. We haven't touched on Shetland at all. I wonder if you can give me an indication of what you know about geese numbers in Shetland. Morag? I can tell you that when we were looking to start up the grey lag demonstration pilots, we identified places where there was a particularly high density of grey lag geese, a high density for the amount of improved farmland that we were present at Shetland and had one of the highest numbers. Although our last national census was in 2008, so those numbers are a bit out of date now, I would certainly expect Shetland to have a high density of resident grey lag geese still. I know that there have been some surveys, some local counts of them. I know that they have had issues with resident grey lag geese. They were offered to join the demonstration pilot and chose not to. Not for any specific reason that I'm aware of, there will have been some reasons locally, but I don't know what that was. They simply decided not to. Certainly, they have issues. I mean, there are other places with high densities of grey lag geese across Scotland. Although we've had demonstrations project in four sites and people with that experience are asking for continued government support to control grey lag geese, there are other places across Scotland who would also be looking for similar support. That follows on from what you were saying earlier about taking action and controlling early doors rather than letting it build up and becoming the problem. Do you think that Finlay has a question? We've heard from the Scottish Crofters Federation that that any reduction in funding, and I quote, would not only be in terms of degradation of the unique environment created and maintained by marker cropping but also on the economic and mental wellbeing of individual crofters. We mustn't forget the impact on the wellbeing of those who farm in those areas. Do you have any confidence that the report that is going to be published or the way forward that is going to be published will be able to be put in place in time to fund the spring 2023 calls, which we heard back in April when it was fast approaching. We are now into November. Do you think that the report will allow us to look at the pilots wherever and put a workable scheme in place that will address the concerns of the crofters? Ailet sites in Lewis and Harris, Pellantiree and UST all have funding offered from the minister, so they will be funded for spring 2023. Other sites do not have any funding. Other sites will be looking for support and will be looking for the outcome from the national policy review. Our Nature Scots role to date has been an enabling one to try and enable farmers and crofters to control resident grey-lag geese by providing advice and licences and demonstration projects. To meet that level of extra demand that may be out there would be a significant departure from current national goose policy, which directs us to focus our resources on the species of greatest conservation need. We really need to wait for the outcome from the policy review and, certainly, early feedback from the people who have been responding to questionnaires indicates that there is a big demand for support for controlling resident grey-lag geese. Thank you, Morag. We have a supplementary from Rachel Hamilton. It's not a supplementary, it's a separate question. Would you like me to answer that? It's a question to Ray. In an earlier answer, you talked about not having a systemic monitoring of, I presume that's the count, but I'm not quite sure what you meant by that. If I have that right, so if you could just clarify that. I wanted to ask you, with the dire threat of avian flu right now, and the fact that NatureScot already has a surveillance network set up, is there any plan for NatureScot to merge both of those activities, to monitor what has been effective within the pilot projects for control of migratory birds and the natural death of migratory birds through avian flu? In my mind, the two are not mutually exclusive right now. In terms of monitoring, all of our geese on populations are part of a fairly broad-scale monitoring programme. That will look at national census of different species at different time intervals, depending on what we need to know and how the status may or may not be changing and so on. The last resident grey-like census in Scotland was done in 2008. Since then, and as we've been carrying out the adaptive management pilots, there has been annual counts on those sites, on the key sites, so that we can monitor the impacts or otherwise of the pilots. As far as avian flu is concerned, we are currently working on a forward plan, so at the request of the Scottish Government, NatureScot has set up a task force for different agencies, and we are pulling together the best information, the best signs that we've got, the ideas around monitoring and so on. What we do going forward will be very much part of that plan, and that will cover all species, not just geese and not just grey-like geese. We are getting advice from NatureScot's Scientific Advisory Committee, who are a group of academics, and those are the kind of questions that they have been asked to look at and think about a forward monitoring plan. What advice and what they recommend and what we do will absolutely be based on some sort of prioritisation and affordability going forward. Certainly, there is the potential for avian influenza to be affecting all goose species, and the more we can pull together to better understand that, the better. Despite the fact that the current outbreak, if we want to call it that, has really picked up speed last November in the Solway, and that was contained to the Solway population. The cases elsewhere may be on par with what we might expect everywhere else over the winter, apart from Islay. However, as we see what is happening and how different populations might be impacted, we will work through the prioritisation for monitoring and picking up the data. I hope that that answers your question. Thank you. It is really helpful. It would be useful for the committee to understand in our remit what NatureScot takes forward in terms of the plans that you talk about there with the academics. We will be the task force. Although NatureScot is leading, it involves animal plant health agency, Scottish Government, wildlife management, Marine Scotland, RSVB and various other organisations for public health, because there are issues around potential impacts on human health, environmental health and what we do about the collection or otherwise of carcasses and so on. All of that will be pulled together in this forward plan. I think that the draft of that is due fairly soon. Once that is done, we can share that with the committee. That brings us to the end of our questions. I thank Ray McKenzie and Morag Milne for their time this morning and their helpful evidence. Before we move to our next item of business, I invite members to consider next steps. You will see from the papers that the committee may, for example, wish to await the publication of the five-yearly review into goose management in Scotland and consider the issue again at this point. Are members happy to agree to this course of action? Our second item of business today is consideration of the rural support simplification and improvement Scotland number 2 regulations 2022. I refer members to paper 2 from page 10 of their meeting pack. Do members have any comments on this instrument? No comments. We now move to our final agenda item, which is consideration of a consent notification relating to a UKSI, the trade in animals and related products, amendment and legislative functions, regulations 2022. I refer members to pages 3 and 4 from page 17 of their members pack. Do members have any comments on the notification? No comments. Are members content to agree with the Scottish Government's decision to consent to the provision set out in the notifications being included in UK rather than Scottish subordinate legislation? Thank you. I now formally close the meeting.