The arrival of autumn on the Lancashire coast brings one of the most magnificent, heart-stirring natural spectacles on the planet. High in the October skies, the first major migratory waves of Pink-footed Geese (Anser brachyrhynchus) arrive right on cue, their haunting, musical yelping calls echoing across the sky.
These birds may have just completed an epic, non-stop, multi-thousand-mile crossing over the freezing North Atlantic from their sub-Arctic breeding grounds on the tundra of Iceland and Greenland. They navigate severe ocean storms to seek winter safety on our shifting shores.
Yet, for many of these majestic travellers, their reward for surviving the Atlantic crossing is a wall of lead shot from commercial shooting syndicates.
I recently overheard a local shooter bragging about a syndicate systematically slaughtering a massive number of these magnificent geese in a single session. Within the legitimate shooting community, bragging about a bag extending to hundreds of geese is viewed as shameful, greedy, and unsporting. Millions of pounds and thousands of hours are spent by local farmers, the RSPB, and legitimate wildfowling clubs to provide safe roosts for these birds. Taking hundreds of birds completely undermines the delicate balance and goodwill that local landowners and conservationists have built over decades.
Let’s draw an ironclad line in the sand right here. There is a massive, permanent chasm between traditional, independent countrymen/true sportsmen who live by authentic field ethics, respect the quarry, and only ever take a bird or two for the family pot, and the vile characters running (and supporting) big-money commercialised operations who treat our wild Arctic visitors as a disposable commodity, just to boast to their pals about a high slaughter rate score.
The geographical mechanics of this massacre expose a massive, institutional farce.
Shooting is strictly banned on all RSPB Marshside reserve land, which manages our coastal slacks as a designated nature sanctuary. Because the corporate grey suits and wealthy syndicates cannot touch the birds on the protected coast, they lease private agricultural mosslands and stubble fields further inland. They wait for the geese to fly inland to fulfil their daily feeding routines before opening fire.
The Final BASC and 2029 Lead Ban Integration
To make this institutional farce even worse, there are no statutory daily bag limits enforced by law on private land in England. While commercial syndicate users have transitioned to non-toxic steel shot—highly aware of the strict legal landscape—they exploit the legal void regarding private farmland bags purely for ego. Even though the total ban on lead for all game (like pheasants or pigeons) doesn't completely take effect until 1 April 2029, the law is absolute today: you cannot legally use lead shot for geese right now. You must use steel, bismuth, or tungsten composites immediately. Yet, while these shooters manage to navigate non-toxic cartridge laws out of strict statutory necessity, they completely flout the authentic shooting community's own voluntary restrictions
- The BASC Wildfowling Code of Practice: The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) explicitly states that shooting excessive numbers of birds is considered totally unacceptable and unsporting.
- The Goose Code: For ethical inland or flight shooting, established codes strictly recommend a voluntary bag limit of 5 Pinkfeet or 3 Greylag geese per gun, per shooting session.
- Estate/Club Rules: Traditional local wildfowling clubs frequently write these strict limits directly into their lease agreements. Exceeding them won't break statutory wildlife laws, but it is a total breach of field contract that results in being banned from the land.
To blast hundreds of birds out of the sky—openly flouting the BASC codes while knowing wild geese cannot be sold legally anywhere in the UK, leading to absolute environmental waste—is not fieldcraft. It is pure, unchecked greed.
This heavy-handed drive by institutional bureaucrats to treat our coast as a corporate playground while policing the wild will feel intensely familiar to independent country sportsmen.
During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, those exact same boardroom grey suits attempted to enforce blanket vaccine mandates, completely dismissing the power of 'natural', robust immune recovery in favour of top-down corporate control.
We have already watched this exact pattern of bureaucratic farce play out during the state-sponsored badger culling campaigns. Independent outdoorsmen and traditional country sportsmen were completely disgusted when faceless government ministries pushed inhumane night-shooting mandates that violated basic field ethics, swamped private estates with heavy-handed red tape, and completely ignored their own independent scientific panels—all to maintain a highly political, state-funded management loop.
More than 247,000 badgers have been killed since the current English badger cull began in 2013. Thousands of native badgers are exterminated from Cornwall to the Lake District, under misguided attempts to control bovine Tuberculosis, an infectious respiratory disease that affects cattle.
When commercial syndicate users happily boast about piling up excessive amounts of dead geese in a West Lancashire potato field, they aren't speaking as genuine countrymen who understand the raw earth. They are just ignorant rogues creating a localised rerun of the Great American Buffalo Slaughter, managed methodically by greedy modern suits.
Just like the historical commercial hunters who senselessly annihilated 60 million bison until only a few hundred remained in the wild, some of these modern syndicates are treating an irreplaceable natural wonder like a cheap high-score commodity - to line their pockets.
Our local coastline, skies, and inland fields belong to the wildlife and the independent, real countrymen who respect them—not the boardroom suits, the clipboard brigade, and the bragging, egocentric little goons trying to police the wild with reckless shooting behaviour,
The eventual extermination of an ancient species may seem like good fun to crass psychotic egos and fast profit to some get-rich-quick syndicates. However, the traditional sportsperson sees this type of city-bred, mass slaughter as totally anathema to sincere British sportsmanship.
As for myself, I shall continue to shoot many geese - but with a camera!
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