One Border, Two Rulebooks: How Poland and Germany Regulate the Same Migratory Game Birds

A migratory goose feeding in a field along the Polish-German border may cross from one legal universe into another within a single afternoon flight. On one side of the 467-kilometre frontier, hunting rules are set by a single nationwide regulation issued by Poland’s minister of the environment. On the other, Germany’s sixteen federal states fine-tune their own seasons and exemptions under a federal framework. A new study in the journal Environmental Management shows that this governance mismatch produces strikingly different hunting seasons, legal species lists and reported harvest levels for the very same populations of migratory game birds that both countries share.

The research, led by Kinga Piórkowska of the University of Szczecin together with Wiktor Strączyński, Łukasz Jankowiak and Michał Polakowski, combines comparative legal analysis with twelve hunting seasons of national bag statistics, from 2012/2013 to 2023/2024, for five transboundary taxa: the common wood pigeon (Columba palumbus), the Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola) and three goose taxa of the genus Anser, namely greylag goose, the bean goose complex and greater white-fronted goose. These species were chosen because they are regulated in both countries, span contrasting ecological guilds from forest-breeding woodcock to crop-feeding geese, and have publicly available abundance estimates that allow harvest to be placed in context.

Europe’s hunting systems blend two traditions. In a territorial, district-based model, hunting rights attach to legally delimited hunting districts managed by leaseholders, while in a licensing model access flows through individual permits and registries. Poland and Germany are both hybrids, but in different ways. Poland runs a strongly centralised, district-based system embedded in the Polish Hunting Association, which counts more than 130,000 hunters and about 2,800 hunting clubs. Germany retains district-based hunting rights but grants its Länder far greater regulatory competence, and the Deutscher Jagdverband reports 467,682 licensed hunters as of November 2025. The researchers expected the federal structure to generate more within-country heterogeneity and more local adjustment, and the data bear that out.

The contrasts in season design are concrete. In Poland, one national regulation opens the wood pigeon season from 15 August to 30 November, the woodcock season from 1 September to 21 December, and the goose season from 1 September to 21 December, extended to 15 January only in four western voivodeships. Germany’s federal baseline seasons start later, with wood pigeon from 1 November to 31 January and woodcock from 16 October to 15 January, while geese face a shorter two-part window from 1 to 31 August and 1 November to 15 January that states may modify. Within Germany, the resulting mosaic is vivid: Brandenburg permits extra goose hunting on fields with documented crop damage, Sachsen-Anhalt authorises goose hunting when at least fifty geese are feeding on crops, Schleswig-Holstein extends the goose season to 31 January but bans harvest inside Natura 2000 sites, and Hesse has long maintained a moratorium on woodcock hunting. Germany’s catalogue of huntable birds is also broader, including species such as the mute swan, brent goose and several gulls that are not game in Poland.

Reported harvest differed enormously between the neighbours. Germany averaged 73,444 geese per season against Poland’s 11,033, a geometric mean ratio of 6.67. For Eurasian woodcock, Germany reported 9,742 birds a year compared with 367 in Poland, a nearly 27-fold difference. The largest absolute gap concerned wood pigeon: Germany’s average annual bag of 426,654 birds was more than 37 times Poland’s 11,117. Temporal trajectories were taxon-specific. Goose harvest rose in both countries, by 2.91 percent per season in Poland and 1.99 percent in Germany. Woodcock bag declined sharply in Poland at minus 7.34 percent per season, while Germany showed no directional trend. Wood pigeon harvest fell in both countries, but nearly twice as steeply in Germany, at minus 8.38 percent versus minus 3.85 percent per season, with a significant country-by-taxon-by-time interaction in the global model.

Placing harvest against population estimates sharpens the picture, though the authors stress the ratios are indicative, not demographic mortality rates, because autumn and winter bags may include migrants breeding elsewhere. For wood pigeon, Poland’s annual take represents roughly 0.5 to 0.6 percent of its 1.0 to 1.3 million breeding pairs, while Germany’s corresponds to about 6 to 11 percent of 2.9 to 3.5 million pairs. Woodcock harvest corresponds to under 1 percent of Poland’s 20,000 to 100,000 breeding pairs but roughly 13 to 20 percent of Germany’s 20,000 to 39,000 pairs. For geese, where reference estimates align better with the hunting period, the pattern reverses: Poland’s 9,000 to 11,000 birds per year equal about 22 to 27 percent of wintering and migration-period numbers, whereas Germany’s 78,000 to 108,000 represent about 13 to 18 percent, even though Germany’s absolute bag is far larger.

The institutional machinery behind these numbers differs in ways that matter for management. In Poland, migratory game birds are exempt from the statutory pre-season inventory; leaseholders record a planned take per species with a permissible range of 85 to 115 percent of that value, which in practice tends to anchor on the previous season’s reported bag, making planning largely path-dependent rather than abundance-driven. Recent Polish evidence shows realised waterbird harvest often falls far below planned ceilings. Ownership of free-living animals rests with the State Treasury until lawful harvest, and statutory compensation for crop damage covers only large mammals, leaving growing goose damage outside the mandatory scheme. In Germany, the Federal Hunting Act explicitly aims hunting at preventing agricultural losses by holding game populations at non-damaging levels, and although statutory compensation also excludes geese, states such as Lower Saxony and, since May 2025, Schleswig-Holstein run dedicated goose-damage funds financed from nature-conservation budgets.

The authors are careful about what these associations do and do not show. The study compares governance design and reported harvest patterns; it does not measure enforcement, hunter behaviour or population-level effects, and differences in bag statistics may also reflect habitat, hunter density, reporting incentives and taxonomic aggregation, since German categories such as Wildtauben and Wildgänse had to be harmonised using state-level species breakdowns, including correcting pigeon baskets for the near-total wood pigeon share of about 99.5 percent and subtracting non-native Egyptian and Canada geese. The researchers argue the real governance challenge is not to erase regulatory variation, which can legitimately reflect regional migration timing and agricultural conflicts, but to distinguish coordinated, evidence-based differentiation from uncoordinated fragmentation affecting the same flyway populations, a concern sharpened by climate-driven shifts in breeding and migration phenology.

As a practical path forward, the team points to adaptive harvest management, citing the Svalbard pink-footed goose quota system run by Denmark and Norway since 2013/14 under the AEWA framework. Rather than proposing full adaptive management everywhere, they sketch a tiered framework for transboundary populations: harmonised harvest reporting and shared abundance indices as a minimum; predefined trigger rules, such as conservative season or quota reductions when indices fall below thresholds; and full adaptive management only where monitoring and institutional capacity justify the investment, as with goose populations tied to recurrent crop damage. For birds that ignore borders with such indifference, the study suggests, coordinated bookkeeping is the first and most achievable step toward genuinely shared stewardship.

Subject of Research: Transboundary governance and harvest regulation of migratory game birds in Poland and Germany

Article Title: Regulatory Mismatch and Transboundary Governance of Migratory Game Birds: A Comparison of Poland and Germany

Article References: Piórkowska, K., Strączyński, W., Jankowiak, Ł., & Polakowski, M. (2026). Regulatory Mismatch and Transboundary Governance of Migratory Game Birds: A Comparison of Poland and Germany. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02584-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02584-0

Keywords: migratory game birds, hunting governance, Poland, Germany, harvest statistics, wood pigeon, Eurasian woodcock, geese, transboundary management, adaptive harvest management, hunting legislation, Regulatory