Roadside Geese

I wonder if they are staying close to the roadside in the hope they won't be shot at?  Geese shooting holidays in Orkney is big business now - just put it into a search engine of your choice and see all the results.  

Legally they are not allowed to shoot from the road, but there don't seem to be many other constraints.  We have a resident population of about 20.000 Greylags, much the same as the human population, but we have a winter influx of 65,000 on top of that so the farmers' fields are devastated by them.  They don't only eat the grass or crop, they pull it out of the ground, roots and all, and the result, particularly in a year as wet as this, is mud and acres of goose droppings.  

There does need to be some way of controlling numbers, but seeing people killing them for "sport" as a holiday pastime seems wrong.  Seeing piles of bodies in the corner of fields or in the back of a pick-up is hard to stomach.

I love to see them, watch them and hear them, but would probably feel differently if I had fields of spring barley or summer grazing being destroyed by them.  It's a tricky one . . .