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

Abstract Hunting governance in Europe blends territorial and licensing traditions, producing hybrid regulatory regimes. We compared Poland’s centralised hunting act with Germany’s federal state-level regulations to examine how governance architecture was associated with season design, legal game status, and reported harvest for shared migratory game birds. We combined comparative legal analysis with national bag statistics from 12 hunting seasons (2012/2013–2023/2024) and available abundance estimates for wood pigeon, Eurasian woodcock, and three Anser geese taxa. Germany had higher indicative harvest-to-abundance ratios for wood pigeon (≈6–11%) and woodcock (≈13–20%) than Poland (≈0.5–0.6% and <1%), whereas geese had higher ratios in Poland (≈22–27%) than Germany (≈13–18%) when interpreted against wintering or migration-period reference populations. Findings are descriptive and should not be interpreted as demographic harvest mortality. They highlight a transboundary governance mismatch and support harmonised harvest reporting, explicit reporting of population-reference phases, and cautious pilot testing of adaptive management where monitoring and institutional capacity are sufficient.