Geese are first indicators that Mayo winter will soon be upon us

EARLY autumn. Lough Carra. Days are shortening more quickly than it takes time to tell.

Time afloat on the lake is curtailed by an early dusk, though not before the visual and audible feast that comes with fading light.

Geese are the first indicators of coming dark. I hear them in the distance, communicating with musical tones, and know they will soon be on the move.

For some reason, the local greylag goose population is unwanted. They are no more native to this part of the world than we ourselves, yet we, as self-appointed arbiters and selective guardians, determine that we belong and they do not.

I welcome them. The sight of a hundred and more of these large birds crossing water barely overhead stirs the soul. They sing and cry in flight, and stretch that long and ragged V low over my seat in the boat.

The sky is filled with the sound of wings, a home-going chorus on its way to the far shore, to the fields they will graze, or to the shallow bay where they will spend the night afloat.

The local population seems relatively stable, although members of the flock do tend to come and go a bit.

There are also greylags on Lough Mask, and a great deal more on Lough Corrib. The Corrib birds have bred prolifically, and appear to be increasing in number.

Being large birds, geese require large territories. When numbers increase, the tendency is that some of the flock will break away and find new territory where they can settle down. For the Corrib birds, Carra makes an ideal staging post, somewhere they can drop in as they pass through.

There is far more rich feeding to be found around the lake than was historically available. It is grass that these geese like, and the sweeter it is the better they like it. Fields full of rye grass are just as pleasing to these birds as they are to our farming neighbours.

Somehow, the number of geese found on Carra remains fairly constant, as if capacity has been reached. Though the numbers here ebb and flow, there are never too many.

While working in Scotland I saw flocks of geese many thousand strong. To watch them lift from their feeding grounds at the end of a winter day was quite incredible. The sky was a cloud of birds, a cacophony of sound.

Nobody minded them as long as they stuck to the stubble fields. They didn't.

Rather than be content with leftover harvest remains, they made regular incursions into fields of winter barley, which they stripped nearly bare with their sharply toothed bills. Landowners and others found compensation by means of a roasted goose dinner.

Thanks to an effective predator control programme, water birds on Carra have enjoyed a successful breeding season. There appears to be no competition for them from the geese. And yet the geese are not wanted.

Well, that isn't entirely true, for I would rather like to get my hands on one or two, and get my teeth into them. While there isn't a great deal of meat on a wild goose, what little there is is just delicious.

Now here lies the problem. For a non-shooting man such as myself, there is no legal means of acquiring a wild goose. Besides, Carra is a wildfowl reserve, and shooting is forbidden.

How, then, can I proceed? After all, as long as we have these unwanted and often maligned birds with us, we should be free to indulge. It's time to hatch a plan.