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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: November/December 2007
Birds migrating over the Mediterranean face fire from all directions
ATHENS --Moving to protect migratory birds from some of the most prolifigate hunters in Europe, the highest Greek administrative court on November 9, 2007 banned hunting until November 21 in several of the regions where wildlife habitat was most severely damaged by August 2007 wildfires.
The Council of State, as the court is called, was expected to rule by November 21 on whether the hunting ban should remain in place longer. The Greek hunting season normally runs from August through February, but even if the ban is not extended, it was widely acclaimed for supposedly protecting many of the most fragile European migratory birds during the peak weeks of their passage over the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Agean seas.
Aliki Panagopoulou, projects coordinator for ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece, was skeptical.
"The environmental group that petitioned the court is called, in a liberal translation, the Animal Friends & Ecological Union of Greece," Panagopoulou told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "Unfortunately, the vice-minister for the environment issued a ministerial decree just a few days later which effectively reinstated hunting, with few limitations. Hunting was banned only in the burned areas, the wild boar killing quota was limited to two per group of 10 hunters except in Peloponnesus, where it is one per group, etcetera. Hunting is prohibited on burned lands," Panagopoulou said, "except that there are not animals to hunt there anyway. They have retreated to areas left unburned, some of which can now be seen as nothing but oases. Hunting is now allowed in these areas--not good at all, especially in the areas that have suffered the most."
The August 2007 fires razed 177,265 hectares in Greece altogether--about 72,000 acres. Fires also ravaged parts of Albania, Serbia, Croatia, and Macedonia. About 56% of the damage in Greece was to natural habitat, and 41% to agricultural habitat, including olive orchards, vineyards, and grasslands, according to a World Wildlife Fund assessment. About a third of the burnt habitat was within protected nature areas.
The fires, which killed 67 people in Greece, "caused severe damage to the habitats of many species including the golden jackal, turtles, hedgehogs and lizards," the World Wildlife Fund found, but the greatest harm was to bird habitat.
The Council of State heard testimony that the fires "led to the disappearance of hundreds of species, and that hunting should be banned to 'protect wildlife trying to survive,' Agence France-Presse reported.
The Council of State acted two weeks after the Agricultural Development Ministry extended the hunting season on the islands of Lemnos and Lesvos, and authorized jacklighting, to encourage hunters to kill more rabbits and boar. Hunters apparently introduced boar to Lesvos as recently as 2002.
Falcon massacre
Hunters continued to defy the 1979 European Bird Directive elsewhere around the Mediterranean, most blatantly in Cyprus.
Citrus farmers near Fassouri, Cyprus on October 10, 2007 discovered the remains of 46 endangered red-footed falcons and six wounded falcons lying in a tight cluster. The strongest clue to the identity of the shooter was reportedly that the 52 falcons were killed and injured by someone who left just 52 empty shotgun shells behind.
"The killing of the red-footed falcons during their migration has prompted particular anger as the birds have just been reclassified from 'vulnerable' to 'globally threatened,' reported Independent correspondent Daniel Howden.
"Globally near-threatened is as bad as it gets, which makes this one of the worst cases of illegal bird killings ever reported in Europe," said Bird Life Cyprus representative Martin Hellicar. "To put it in context, the whole population of Bulgaria could be 50 red-footed falcons." Because red-footed falcons nest and travel in colonies, Hellicar explained, "It is possible that this wiped out the entire red-footed falcon population of Bulgaria."
Summarized Howden, "Cyprus is in the middle of one of the main migration routes for birds heading for the African warmth during cold European winters. Conservationists have been battling hunters for decades over the right to shoot or trap birds as they pass over the island. The Greek-Cypriot government has had regular run-ins with the European Commission over the issue," and earlier in 2007 "received an official warning from Brussels after Nicosia sanctioned the spring bird shooting season for the first time in 14 years."
The warning came soon after the start of campaigning for the February 2008 Cypriot presidential election.
"They are shooting these birds because of the presidential elections," alleged Hellicar at the time to Agence France-Presse.
Explained Agence France-Presse, "The government has cited a derogation under European Union law that can permit shooting--for purposes of population control," not an issue involving any of the migratory species passing over Cyprus. Most heavily targeted were turtle doves. Between 19,000 and 30,000 turtle doves per year are shot in Cyprus each fall, when the Bird Directive allows bird hunting.
Cyprus later agreed to again halt spring bird hunting. The 2008 spring bird migration will begin after the elections.
There are about 50,000 bird hunters in Cyprus, but just 100 members of Bird Life Cyprus, Mike Sergeant of BBC News reported in October 2007 from Larnaca, Cyprus-- and shotguns are scarcely the hunters' only weapons. Sergeant readily found hunters who showed him how to trap birds with nets and with lime-coated pomegranite branches.
"In the past decade, Cyprus has made dramatic progress in reducing illegal hunting and trapping. Spurred on by European Union membership," achieved in 2004, "the authorities reduced the number of wild birds being killed from several million a year to a few hundred thousand," Sergeant said.
But bird trappers "are inventing ways to avoid the police," police inspector Lakis Kousionous told Sergeant. "They have spotters, they have mobile phones. It is difficult to catch them, and you cannot prosecute unless you find them doing the offense."
Most of the trapped birds reputedly are made into a dish called ambelopouli.
"The illegal delicacy, consisting of whole pickled robins and a similar-sized warbler called the black cap, has been in danger of disappearing from the clandestine menus of rural restaurants," Independent correspondent Cahal Milmo reported in 2005.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had funded a crackdown on bird trapping that brought the arrests of 43 trappers in the British-administered portion of Cyprus.
Successful bird trappers make about £30,000 during each migration, Milmo estimated--more than $60,000 U.S.
Malta warned
A week after the falcon killing on Cyprus, the European Commission reiterated warnings to Malta that it must stop allowing hunters to kill quail and turtle doves during the spring mating season.
European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas "said the Maltese could continue to hunt the birds in the autumn," reported Associated Press, "but targeting them during the spring migration when they fly north from Africa to Europe is putting the species at risk.
"Malta already bowed to EU pressure this spring by cutting short the turtle dove hunting season. Upset hunters and trappers were blamed for acts of vandalism in and around a bird reserve," said Associated Press.
Dimas' statements responded to appeals from Nature Trust (Malta) and International Animal Rescue Malta for the European Union to clarify conflicting claims from the EU and the Maltese government about agreements reached about bird hunting when Malta was admitted to the EU.
The 1979 Birds Directive does not allow birds to be trapped during spring migrations, but Maltese hunters asserted that they had been granted exemptions for killing as many as seven species.
"European Union law is at last catching up with a killing frenzy that has virtually no parallel on the continent," wrote Independent environment editor Michael McCarthy. "Every year scarcely believable numbers of thrushes, robins, larks, swallows, turtle doves and many other species, including birds of prey, are shot as they try to use the island, situated between Sicily and Tunisia, as a staging-post in their Mediterranean crossing from Africa to Europe, and back again. Anything that flies is considered fair game.
"Some estimates of birds killed annually put the full toll at roughly two million birds," McCarthy wrote, "while thousands more songbirds, especially finches, are caught for the caged bird trade. The annual massacre is thought to significantly contribute to the 70% plunge in numbers of turtle doves nesting in Europe in the last 25 years."
Malta issued a set of "Conservation of Wild Birds Regulations" in 2006, but has yet to implement them in compliance with the E.U. Birds Directive.
Malta is also reputedly a conduit for trafficking in poached birds and other wildlife from Africa. More than 500 skins of birds including eagles, ducks, egrets, and a kingfisher were found in just four abandoned suitcases at the Malta International Airport in January 2005, along with the pelts of foxes, an Egyptian mongoose, and a jungle cat. The suitcases were in transit from Cairo, Egypt.
BirdLife Malta president Joseph Mangion told media at the time that he hoped the discovery would increase official attention to interdicting poaching and trafficking--but there is little sign that it did.
About 16,800 bird hunters and trappers make up approximately 4.2% of the Maltese human population of about 400,000--but the bird hunters and trappers are politically organized, while opponents of bird hunting and trapping are not.
Spain, France, Italy
The value of political mobilization against traditional wildlife massacres was illustrated in Catalan, Spain during October 2007. Public protest obliged the Catalan government to back quickly away from an attempt to legalize netting birds around water sources and capturing them with glue-coated branches.
Both methods are forbidden by the European Union Bird Directive, but meaningfully enforcing the Bird Directive has proved difficult. Both France and Italy have repeatedly violated the Bird Directive with virtual impunity almost since it was adopted.
France, for example, in July 2005 opened duck hunting three weeks earlier than allowed. "The government was accused by animal rights activists of making a backroom deal with France's 1.5 million hunters in return for support for its failed attempt to ratify the E.U. constitution," reported Alex Duval Smith of The Independent. "The move was seen as the second sop to the hunting lobby," Duval wrote, "after claims from the French bird protection league, the Ligue Pour La Protection des Oiseaux, that France was alone in Europe in extending the deadline" for enforcing a ban on the use of lead birdshot."
The European Union Council of Ministers in 1995 agreed that member nations would abolish the use of lead shot in wetlands by 2000. Britain complied in 1999, while the Netherlands and Denmark banned lead shot entirely. But French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin allowed French hunters to continue using lead shot until July 2006.
Julian Pettifer of BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents program meanwhile detailed the frustrations of the Lega Italiana Protezione Uccelli in attempts to stop illegal bird shooting and trapping.
"In the Breschia valleys," Pettifer recounted, "the LIPU has confiscated more than 50,000 traps set to capture robins and other small birds. In recent years, 600 mist nets have also been removed, and 6,000 trapped birds have been freed."
But "One of the problems with law enforcement in Italy is that no fewer than five different police forces are supposed to regulate hunting," Pettifer added. "General Fernando Fuschetti of the Forestry Police took me to a wetland near Naples where his men had raided and shut down a string of 10 hunting ponds," which had allegedly been operated by an organized crime syndicate.
"While the general was very proud of what he regarded as a victory for law enforcement," Pettifer continued, "another police officer I spoke to--from a different force--was highly critical of what he regarded an assault on a revered local institution."
Bad habits spread
In recent years the use of lime trapping to catch birds has even made a comeback in Britain and Scotland, where it was believed to have been mostly abolished generations ago.
Haddington Sheriff Peter Gilliam on November 10, 2007 fined William White, 60, £750 and barred him from keeping birds for five years, after Scottish SPCA undercover officers caught him in possession of four dead linnets, three live linnets, lime sticks, and a pot of glue, and found at least four more live wild-caught birds at White's home. White claimed through counsel that he had bred songbirds for 50 years, and wanted the linnets to hybridize with his captive-bred canaries.
Crimes against wild birds in the United Kingdom increased from 726 incidents in 2005 to 1,109 in 2006, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The most frequent reported offenses were shooting, poisoning, trapping, and nest destruction.
"We always thought it was one old guy here or a young bloke there who were taking birds for their own collections, but it appears there is actually a thriving market for birds caught here and taken south or abroad," a Scottish SPCA undercover investigator told Independent Scotland writer Paul Kelbie.
"It's a U.K.-wide thing," the Scottish SPCA investigator continued. "It is bigger than we have dealt with before. It has certainly surprised us. Considering it is possible to catch these birds easily, if you know what you are doing, it is money for nothing. It also doesn't carry the same stigma other 'substances' do. Appearing in court charged with dealing in a dodgy finch is not going to have the same drawbacks to being caught as dealing in drugs." .