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Malta's Spring Massacres
As dawn breaks over Malta on 1 April, many of the country's 12,000 licensed hunters will open fire on migratory birds with renewed vigour. It is a rush of excitement for hunters because this spring they can start hunting 10 days earlier than previous years, following the government's decision, earlier this month, to trim the bird protection regulations. Recommended by the Authority of Review (AOR) other trimmings include unprotecting the moorhen and water rail and allowing trapping in Spring for 12 days.
Now hunters can shoot on quails and turtle doves for 7 weeks, as the birds stop over in the only European country that allows spring shooting on migratory birds. "The AOR restored a small fraction of what hunters lost after the updated 1993 regulations," said the hunters' association.
But most Maltese will greet the ringing shots with dismay. Once a tradition most people respected, these days hunting arouses opposition from a growing generation that views hunting as barbaric. Occasionally, the tension between hunters and environmentalists breaks into violent encounters. Alternattiva Demokratika (AD), the green party, insist that most people oppose hunting.
Saviour Balzan, AD's environment spokesperson, said: "None of the people in the AOR is an expert on bird migration. Their report is full of contradictions, inaccuracies and wrong concepts. They invented excuses to change the regulations." AD accused the government of pruning the regulations to win hunters' hearts before the general elections to be held within a year.
The minister for the environment countered that the AOR members are experts in their fields. The government set up the AOR to review and recommend amends to the law after both hunters and environmentalists protested against the new law which entered into force in 1994 - hunters fumed that the restrictions trampled over their hobby while environmentalists said they were inadequate. Appointed by the environment minister, 5 members formed the AOR: an economist, two experts in marine biology and fish-farming, an environmental scientist and an anthropologist.
Before the AOR members convened, the hunters lobbied fiercely to water down the law. Although they make up just over 3% of the population, in a country where elections are decided on a knife-edge, hunters wield enough political power to shake the government. They stormed the streets in protests, boycotted the local council elections, dumped oil in a wetland nature reserve and called on the environment parliamentary secretary to resign. In a hunting discussion, a hunter punched the environment secretary, who had to be put, as well as his aides, under police protection 24 hrs/day.
In their review report 3 months ago the AOR recommendations to slash parts of the law hinged on three premises: that hunting is weaved into Malta's culture and tradition, there is no reliable data proving that millions of birds are killed, and that Malta lies outside the main migratory route. But a few inconsistencies leap from their report; in one place they wrote that they accept the argument that hunting and trapping in spring should be banned, but then lengthened the season for hunting and trapping in spring.
Paul Portelli, Director of Birdlife Malta, accused the AOR members as "incompetent cowards who yielded to pressure by hunters."
The AOR's report also rippled through the European Parliament. Several green MEP's raised the issue, asking the EU Commission to make sure Malta raises its bird protection to EU standard before it is allowed to join the union. Claudia Roth, the German spokesperson of the green group in the European Parliament, wrote in a letter to the Maltese prime minister: "The green group is appalled at your government's intention to take the recommendations of the AOR .... which go against the spirit of the Berne Convention."
This is not the first time European politicians aired their concern about hunting. The government originally updated the bird protection regulations in 1993 after pressure from the EU and individual European countries. Back then, the set of regulations that entered into force embraced the spirit of the EU's Birds Directive, with 2 exceptions: allowing hunting in spring and trapping in autumn.
Hunters defend trapping and spring hunting as traditions. And, indeed, over this century hunting seeped into Malta's culture, with the church blessing guns before the hunting season, poems praising hunting in literary books and politicians officially opening exhibitions of stuffed birds. But in the past decade institutions have distanced themselves from hunters, reflecting a shift in public opinion. Hunters are partly to blame for today's opposition. Repeater guns, bird-song played on casette-players to lure birds and chasing birds at sea in outboard dinghies soured public opinion. Meanwhile, the number of hunters trebled in the last 30 years, and today there is as many young hunters as their fathers' generation. While hunters over 50 go hunting for a couple of weeks every year, many young hunters in their twenties tear through the countryside shooting birds, flushing, and blasting, birds of prey from wheat-fields
at dusk.
And perhaps it's because of this intensity that hunting ruffles so many feathers. If all the hunters had to go shooting at one time, over 50 hunters would cram in every square kilometre of countryside. Knud Flensted, an ecologist at the Dansk Ornitologisk Forening (Birdlife Denmark) said: "Hunting in Malta has for many years been too intensive and almost completely out of control. It affects the populations of European bird species, in particular birds of prey, herons, doves, quails, passerines."
In the book Fatal Flight, The Maltese Obsession with Killing Birds, Natalino Fenech estimated that "a minimum of 3 million birds are shot each year", while 1-2.8 million trapped. Yet it's not the sheer numbers that make environmentalists wince, but the kind of birds downed. Fenech estimates that hunters' annual toll includes 16-32,000 herons and egrets, 64-96,000 birds of prey, and 11,500 owls. Hunters dismiss these numbers as 'speculations'.
"Hunters play down the existence of illegal hunting and hunting's effect on bird populations," Portelli said. "The largest part of the hunt is on protected species. Hunters shoot at protected species in the open, even in bird sanctuaries. The police are not doing enough to control illegal hunting."
Three taxidermists busted by the police in the last 2 years offer a glimpse into the scale of illegal hunting. One had 2,000 frozen and stuffed birds, 90 per cent of them protected species; the next had 79 birds, virtually all of them protected; while the other had 400 birds, also mostly protected. The police estimate that about 50 other taxidermists remain, all
operating illegally.
Taxidermy is the main motive behind shooting at protected species. Like an athlete displaying medals, hunters prop the bird trophies in living-room cabinets. In hunters' circles, respect and pride go to the hunters with the largest collection displaying the rarest species. A Griffon Vulture killed a few years ago was priced at about $5,064. But hunters also shoot at birds for the thrill of it, then throwing away the birds which already feature in their collection or leaving them there to rot.
Victor Galea Pace, a law-abiding hunter and major of the Victoria local council, reasoned: "Game birds have decreased so much that hunters get the urge to shoot protected birds. Nowadays, Turtle Dove flocks on passage do not exceed 300."
In a report published last year, entitled Birds In Europe, Their Conservation Status, Birdlife International criticised spring hunting on Turtle Doves. "The decline [of the turtle dove] is likely to be due to severe drought in the species' African wintering grounds, shooting in Winter and during spring migration .... spring shooting of the species should be stopped."
Hunters, however, see it otherwise. Galea Pace blames the drop in Turtle Dove numbers on habitat destruction. "Turtle doves and quails in spring are the only game-birds we get," he argues. "We are accused of shooting birds on their way to breed but we only kill an insignificant number."
Flensted says he only wants to see more controls. "Birdlife Denmark is not against hunting, but hunting both in Malta and Denmark should be kept on a level, where bird populations are not affected considerably and the interests of non-hunters respected. This is not the case in Malta. If the hunting pressure in the rest of Europe equalled Malta, it would be disastrous."
© Victor Paul Borg
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