The first sound of spring is illegal bird slaughter (UK)

[Donna]

It has started. If it happened all at once and in daylight, the great migration would be astonishing to behold: 16m birds streaming into Britain from Africa, stretching from horizon to horizon. As it is, they flutter in day after day, at dusk or at night — birds as tiny as the goldfinch and siskin; birds as central to our idea of summer as the swallow and cuckoo; birds as emblematic of wild places as the gannet, redshank and great skua. And their arrival means it is spring.

These spring-bringers, as Michael McCarthy calls them in his elegiac book about migration, Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, have one thing in common. They come via Malta, a key stepping stone on the central migration lane into Europe from Africa, where tired birds roost and feed after their long flights.

Sadly, there is also evidence that many of them are being illegally shot and trapped on the island. Which is why I found myself in the Maltese countryside last week, at 5.50am one morning, with a team from Birdlife Malta. By 7am we were crouched behind a stone wall looking over a bleached landscape of small rocky fields, carob trees and prickly pears. Below us lay a huge trapping site — a built hide, raised platforms for decoy songbirds in cages and cleared patches of red earth.

Within 10 minutes an illegal finch trapper was setting out his clap nets. Before the two security guards with us could call the police, the trapper spotted us, gathered up his nets and retreated into the hide, where he stared back at us through binoculars. It was a standoff, so we moved to a new, concealed vantage point. By the end of the day we had seen dozens of similar hides on the surrounding hills. Trapping sites are estimated to cover a larger area of the 16-mile long island than Valletta, the capital.

The country has 12,000 licensed shotgun owners plus 3,000 licensed trappers — a density of 80 hunters per square kilometre. Under a disputed exemption from European Union law, Malta last year allowed the trappers to catch quail, turtle doves, golden plovers and song thrushes. But the truth is that many use legal trapping as a cover to catch finches — illegal under both Maltese and EU law — which sell for hundreds of euros. Instead of fluffy dice, local bus drivers hang greenfinches in cages alongside flags of English football clubs.

While we were hiding, a male marsh harrier flew over, en route to Scandinavia. It had fooled the local hunters by arriving early. When raptor migration hots up in a few weeks’ time, according to Birdlife’s spokesman Geoffrey Saliba, the hillsides will echo to the sound of guns as birds of prey come in to roost in the eucalyptus trees. Birdlife volunteers in red T-shirts try to discourage the shooting by pitching “raptor camps� near the trees. Violence is not unknown. A reserve warden’s head was recently peppered with shot.

Big birds seem to spark a shooting frenzy. Tests of marksmanship include eagles, harriers, ospreys and honey buzzards. Even flamingos are regularly shot. In 2008, when a skein of 12 black storks arrived over Malta, they were followed by a darkly comic procession of two police vehicles and a number of Birdlife supporters, constantly being fired at by the hunters. By the time the storks left 24 hours later, only four were airborne.

Malta’s native peregrines and barn owls were polished off in an orgy of shooting in the 1980s; hence the enthusiastic targeting of many EU-protected migratory birds. It may be repellent, but does the shooting of these species actually matter in conservation terms — and is it really any of our business? The answer is pretty clear. Of the 170 or so types of bird migrating over Malta, some 75 are EU-protected species on the way back to 35 countries. Those shot include the pallid harrier, a southern European bird of which there are only 50 breeding pairs; the lesser spotted eagle, now the target of a conservation project in Germany; and our own bittern, hanging on in small numbers in Britain.

Not surprisingly, Malta’s annual bird slaughter was considered a serious obstacle to its accession to the EU before it joined in 2004. But the Nationalist party government, which is still in power, protested in writing to the European commission that it had promised the hunters their sport would be preserved — above and beyond the 32 birds on the official EU “legal quarry� list. So what did the EU do? It merely noted this statement, without pointing out that Malta would have to bring its laws in line with Europe's. In the end, Malta secured an EU agreement to allow the trapping of finches until 2008. The bigger issue was fudged.

Since then the government has been wary of upsetting the 20,000-odd hunters on the island — not least because the last general election was decided on a margin of fewer votes than that. So local penalties handed out for killing protected birds have been too low for deterrence. Last year Malta was found in breach of the EU birds directive by the European Court of Justice. If the same happens this year, Malta could be fined. So be it: the government evidently sees this as the price for staying in power.

Preventing the slaughter of birds migrating across borders is one of the better justifications for European law and Brussels officials must take much of the blame if heftier sanctions, ones that really hurt, are not soon applied. Remember that the next time you wonder when you last heard a cuckoo.

[Bird Crazy]