I would just remind everyone that the precedent that is set tends to be quite important. The birds directive is one of the most effective pieces of conservation legislation in human history, and its massive and positive impact on the annex 1 species is measurable and demonstrative. Given that Scotland has 75 per cent of the world population of the annex 1 species, any decision to reduce their numbers is likely to attract some scrutiny. However, Andrew Bauer is quite right that we cannot say for sure.
The flavour of the discussion seems to be that Scotland is full of people who are chomping at the bit to get out and shoot the geese and thereby solve the problem. The big issue is the feasibility of doing that, because it is not that easy. Indeed, in alluding to the situation in Orkney, Andrew Bauer made it clear that it is just not easy to shoot very large numbers of geese.
On Islay, barnacle geese are shot under licence, and a couple of years back the minister doubled the bag limit there. We did not agree with that, but we have not pursued our opposition. When the limit doubled, the RSPB got complaints from visitors to Islay that the shooting had become more visible. They might not have noticed a difference between 5,000 and 10,000 geese, as the convener said, but they noticed the shooting. If we increase the bag limit further, the shooting will be obvious, because it will be difficult to do and a lot of people will be involved. The whole business of adaptive management—that is, actively controlling the population, which should not be confused with what happened in previous schemes—has for the past couple of years been trialled for greylags on Orkney, but in this context the assumptions are entirely untested.
10:45
I want to get back to the spirit of the petition, which is about the crofting areas in Uist. The machair life scheme has been mentioned; the RSPB was integral to getting that scheme off the ground and running it. The scheme took over from the Uist goose scheme, in the knowledge that the budget for the previous scheme was going to be cut.
The application of £75,000 to £80,000 a year meant that the crops in Uist were, in effect, protected. Under the machair life project, there was an increase in the total area of late-harvested arable crops in Uist, which deliver a huge biodiversity value; the number of crofter complaints went down to zero; and the number of geese shot under licence decreased. We used non-lethal scaring methods—for example, we had children build scarecrows—and a goose-plucking machine was bought as part of the project in an attempt to build a locally sustainable industry. The RSPB has been really involved in such activity and is supportive of that sort of thing.