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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2008

Efforts to restrain island nations' bird massacres

 

LONDON--The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the National Audubon Society refocused attention on Greenland after Malta on April 25, 2008 banned spring quail and turtle dove hunting and trapping.

Malta acted in compliance with a provisional ruling by the European Court of Justice that the traditional Maltese spring bird season violates the 1979 European Bird Directive, adopted five years before Malta joined the European Union. The European Court of Justice is to review the Maltese response to the provisional ruling in two or three years, reported Agence France-Presse.

Much of the European quail and turtle dove population migrates through Malta. Both species are in steep decline, and are protected
against spring hunting and trapping throughout the rest of the European Union.

Greenland on February 29, 2008 bent the tiny nation's 2001 Bird Protection Act to extend the kittiwake and eider hunting season for an extra month, as was also done in 2004. About 10,000 of the 56,000 Greenland residents hunt, 2,000 to sell the meat of seabirds, the rest for sport.

"Seabird numbers are nowhere near sustainable, and the decision this year to allow more birds to be killed is a tragedy," Hasse Hedemand of the Greenland conservation group Timmiaq told WildlifeExtra.com.

The Greenland eider population has declined by 80% in 40 years. A colony of 150,000 Brünnich's guillemots that thrived at Uummannaq in northern Greenland 60 years ago has been completely exterminated, according to the RSPB.