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Bloody Dawns
The destructive obsessive Maltese hunters are facing increasing hostility in Malta and Europe
Lino Farrugia, president of Malta’s largest hunters organisation (the FKNK), was in a belligerent mood when I called him for an interview. “I don’t give interviews,” he told me, “because what is written about bird hunting often has an anti-hunting bias.” I reminded him that we had had a long and amicable conversation about the bird hunting three years previously. “Our policy has changed – now we only give interviews for live TV transmissions.”
I said, “I can still quote you on what you told me three years ago.”
“That’s up to you, but be careful, I am even suing the BBC.”
Three years earlier, Farrugia had said: “Hunting in Malta will die a natural death. It won’t be in our lifetime, but look at all this development eating up the countryside. Besides, I think the next generation or the one after that would not have an interest in hunting.” But things have moved faster than Farrugia predicted, as the parallel developments of Malta’s accession to the European Union (EU) and public outrage have forced the government to act more resolutely to curtail the annual slaughter of migratory birds in Malta. What Farrugia had mused in a spirit of philosophical rhetoric could now become a reality in his lifetime.
Public opinion has been antagonised partly by the perception of wanton destruction of bird-life – hunters shoot the birds for the sport, or to display colourful, large, and rare birds as hunt trophies; trappers trap finches to keep them in private aviaries at home – and partly by the intensity of hunting and trapping. Malta, whose three islands put together are smaller than London’s size, has over 18,000 licensed hunters and trappers – or 57 for every square kilometre of Maltese land territory. Environmentalists estimate that between two and three million birds are shot or trapped annually, and the fact that these are migratory birds – which migrate between Africa and Europe in autumn and spring, using the Maltese islands as a crucial rest-and-refuel stop in their arduous flight across the Mediterranean – has sparked revulsion throughout Europe.
Aside from sheer numbers, studies indicate that the majority of birds shot are protected non-game species. This is correlated by the fact that over ninety percent of casualties at a wild bird hospital operated by the NGO Birdlife Malta are protected species, spurring a fear among ornithologists that certain already-threatened species are dealt further blows by Maltese hunters. These include the globally threatened lesser kestrel, and the “vulnerable” red-footed falcon, whose population has declined by thirty percent in recent years; the latter are gregarious, migrating and breeding in communities, and entire breeding colonies that use Malta as a migratory staging post can be decimated. Rare species are in fact all the more valued as bird trophies, and can fetch high prices if sold to private collectors; a private collection I visited has 700 birds, virtually all Euroasian species, including rare vultures and eagles. Most hunters have small private home displays, something that is borne by the results of two amnesties granted by the government in recent years: a total of 7,005 hunters registered stuffed birds that amounted to over half a million birds, a fourth of which are birds of prey.
Sean Daley, 30, a teacher who describes himself as a moderate hunter admitted that hunters are to blame for the hostile public opinion. He said: “I hear hunters complaining that they are being squeezed, but many hunters are greedy: you get a flock of 50 marsh harriers and they shoot them all without even bothering to pick them up. Even farmers, who understand the thrill of hunting, are turning against hunting when they find their crops trampled by hunters and find dead birds in their fields.”
I asked Daley if he has any bird trophies. "I have about twenty, mostly birds of prey and herons," he replied. "I registered all my trophy birds during the amnesty so I don’t have much of a point to shoot any more birds for trophies. But if a Squacco heron comes within range I would shoot it because I don’t have it and it is relatively rare – yet I wouldn’t particularly go looking for it, and that’s the difference between me and more aggressive hunters."
“Illegal hunting is a big problem,” said Joe Mangion, president of Birdlife Malta. “We continue to get many reports about the shooting of protected birds. Anything larger than a sparrow is gunned down, and on days when no large birds are migrating, hunters shoot swallows and swifts for target practice. We have even witnessed bats and dragonflies being shot at. Unfortunately, the authorities prefer to bury their heads in the sand, saying it is ‘not so bad’.”
The acuteness of illegal hunting has intensified over the past two decades, but successive governments have been reluctant to act because of the hunters’ political clout as voting bloc. In a country of two political parties where elections are won on a couple of thousand votes (Malta has a population of under 400,000), the perception was that the votes of hunters and trappers and their families could swing the balance. However, in last year’s elections for the European Parliament the hunters’ candidate failed to garner votes from the majority of hunters, showing that hunters’ votes are more fragmented than previously assumed. This realisation, coupled with intense public outrage throughout Europe, as well as a growing fear that hunting and trapping is harming tourism – tourism is Malta’s main industry, and the Malta Tourism Authority receives an overwhelming number of complaints from tourists that are shocked by the brazen bird shooting – has now persuaded the government to clamp down on hunters breaking the law.
Law enforcement has been stepped up substantially in the past two years. The unit responsible for policing environmental laws – the ALE, staffed by 24 officers – now patrols the countryside every day of the open season. In 2004 they prosecuted 270 hunters and trappers, and in one of their largest seizures last spring they caught a hunter with 21 protected species, including a lesser kestrel. But the prevalence of illegal hunting has not abated after the two-year-crackdown, and Inspector Miruzzi, head of the ALE, recently voiced doubts about the effectiveness of enforcement, at least in the short-term.
"The ALE really do their best, but progress is very slow, and there won’t be much improvement unless the ALE staff at least doubles," Mangion told me. "A hunter can still take a calculated risk to break the law because the police are stretched so thin."
“The indications are that illegal hunting remains a serious problem,” concurred Nicholas Hanley, head of the EU’s Nature and Biodiversity Unit who visited Malta last April to assess the implementation of the EU’s Birds Directive in Maltese legislation one year on from Maltese membership. “Enforcement is not something the EU can dictate, but we could certainly encourage the government to do more. We’re watching the situation closely.”
In the areas where the EU has the power to dictate, Hanley has found quite a few legal and bureaucratic anomalies. One of these is trapping, which Malta agreed to phase out by 2009 during the pre-accession negotiations, but has since slipped in its timetable to establish a captive finch-breeding programme to replace the trapping of wild birds – something that left Hanley feeling “unhappy that not enough progress has been made.” (A trapper told me: “If they ban trapping, there will be war.”) Another anomaly is the practice of shooting birds from seacraft before they reach land during migration, something that is practised by 500 hunters. “The Birds Directive sets a limit of 12 knots for boats hunters can use,” Hanley explained, “but Maltese hunters’ boats are twice as fast, with a speed of 20 to 25 knots.”
Yet the biggest contention is the continuity of hunting in spring. Malta is the only country in Europe that allows hunting on migratory birds in spring, and the Maltese government has applied a derogation to the Birds Directive by allowing the hunting of turtle doves and quails in spring on the basis that spring hunting is a tradition and that these two game species only turn up in substantial numbers in spring. Birdlife Malta rejects that argument, and wants an outright ban of spring hunting because “shooting the ‘top models’ of the species while migrating to Europe to breed is something that unsustainably disrupts the process of natural selection.”
Is the EU likely to accept the derogation? “There are derogations in many areas of the EU, and Malta has the same potential to apply a derogation,” said Hanley. “But a derogation can only hold if it is applied in a very limited way, and we’ve told the Maltese government that we’re not sure whether the derogation of spring hunting fits within the strict conditions necessary. We can only accept a situation that allows Maltese hunters to hunt a small number of birds subject to strict quotas. Now we are waiting for a report from the Maltese government which will have to demonstrate that strict quotas can be achieved. If the derogation is too lax, we will take the government to [the European] court over this. Other hunters in the Mediterranean are looking at the Maltese derogation and saying, ‘What’s good for Malta is good for us.’ So we have to be careful that the restrictions are tough.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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