Free as a bird?

Picture it. Dawn on Lake Pichola in Rajasthan, India. I can just about make out the pepperpot towers of the Maharana of Udaipur's sprawling palace across the water etched in silver against a deep indigo sky. A feeble ray of winter sun struggles over the palace roof, a sort of oriental version of Chambord, and hits the lake.

Suddenly a lone cormorant glides past my window in the fairytale Lake Palace Hotel and noiselessly dives into the glassy surface, barely disturbing it. Flotillas of ducks, hundreds of them, paddle furiously this way and that, forming wakes like Clapham Junction! The birds in the dense trees of the Palace Gardens awake and twitter their noisy welcome to the sun. Then, most impressive of all, a battalion of solemn pelicans hovers past me. I feel as if I could reach out and touch them, so ethereally do their stumpy bodies and heavy beaks weigh on the air!

As if reluctant, the sun rises higher and the lake becomes a burnished mirror of pure gold. Hawks and falcons wheel majestically above, occasionally diving to some rainbow's end like shooting stars! As if out of nowhere, half a dozen little boats, no bigger than your average bathtub, appear under my window. In them stand silhouetted practically naked fishermen looking like Giacometti bronzes, casting their nets onto the lake. The toll of the temple bell on a neighbouring islet is accompanied by a cacophonously strange paean to the god Vishnu to the rhythm of drumbeats that made me think of Delibes' Lakme'...

Have I impressed you?

This is one experience that I will never forget. As a Maltese I appreciated it that much more! There is absolutely no way that sort of bird life can ever survive in Malta. The very idea of it ever being transferred to this bloodthirsty island was obliterated in a barrage of gunshots. I got the shivers as I imagined the braces of pelicans still dripping blood and the corpse of the cormorant, its impossibly elegant neck and pickaxe-like beak all askew in death! The back page of the Times last Wednesday was a case in point! Yet, I am told that birds very similar to these do still gamble a flight over us, driven by an instinct as old as time and doomed to a lemming's end!

I am not, strangely enough, against hunting per se. This for the simple reason that it is as useless to oppose as the summer petards! For a good number of Malta's macho population being up and about at the crack of dawn in some wonderful spot with a thermos of steaming coffee and a hobza (loaf) is their idea of bliss. Up to that point I agree. The additional gun is optional.

Many hunters escape from boring marriages, nagging mothers in law, difficult children and enervating jobs by spending time communing with nature to keep their sanity. They may even be lucky and occasionally shoot a quail or plover just to keep their sleek dogs in form and then go home. Not good but vaguely acceptable! The ones I object to are the rapacious hunters who respect neither Nature's or Man's regulations and will shoot anything with wings; even the archangels themselves if necessary! Can we forget the slaughter of the six swans a couple of years ago? Picture the cold-blooded horror of The Times report when some illegal taxidermist's hoard was discovered last week? Awful wasn't it? There's also big money in this, which makes it all the more ghastly!

My former school friends Lino Farrugia and Joe Perici of the Ghaqda Kaccaturi u Nassaba (Hunters and Trappers Association) have assured me on various occasions they uphold the first type of hunter not the second, yet even they seem to be totally powerless to control the wholescale slaughter that begins just as soon as the festa petards peter out in October! Legislation, always subject to the appeasement of the floating voter, is, according to organisations like Birdlife totally unsatisfactory. Our greatest influence, the Church, has been deafeningly silent about it too!

In Hindu India it is a crime to kill an animal. Rats as tame as kittens infest the temples. Monkeys gambol in the trees. Cows ruminate placidly in the streets. Jain priests go around with surgeons' masks and a broom so as not to kill any insects! Rajasthani cuisine is predominantly and imaginatively vegetarian with a couple of chicken and mutton dishes thrown in pour épater les touristes! The only guns we saw were at airports and at the Taj Mahal where fear of terrorism from neighbouring Pakistan and Kashmir made it a sorry necessity. I imagine that nowhere in the world is the animal kingdom so respected. Ironic when human life is held in such low esteem!

The territorial fierceness of our hunters is also as objectionable. On dry sunny winter afternoons it is sheer delight to walk in Dwejra or Hagar Qim and pick some wonderful wild asparagus in the process. One has to be careful not to fall headlong into the trappers' nets or pass too near a dura (trappers' semi-circular stone wall).

One cannot go on a country ramble without risking life and limb! Can anything be done to control this? I have witnessed tourists being harangued and threatened in l-Ahrax tal-Mellieha. I was threatened myself, however when I answered in Maltese and told the hunter/trapper that I would be careful not to disturb either his decoys or his nets, he grudgingly let me pass!

Of course, visitors write to this paper condemning hunting in Malta. It is too evident. Have any of your readers been to Italy for instance and gone to the Castelli Romani and seen anything similar? I doubt it. But it happens; and just as callously as it does here. The difference is that Italy is so vast when compared to Malta that we tend to kick up storms in teacups!

What's the use of legislating if there's no one at hand to enforce the law? It makes a laughing stock of our parliament, our police force and our courts every second of every day we live and try to breathe in this lawless island where the maxim is: "I do what I like and what I please.... and Bob's your uncle!"

Errata corrige

Further to my article of August 12 "About Nimbys" I wish to clarify that the reference to the absence of a national trust was specifically taking into account the case of Villa Macedonia and other privately-owned properties.

Din l-Art Helwa has been instrumental in saving and maintaining a number of public properties. It is, in fact, Malta's only version of the national trust. Unfortunately, there is barely enough support and funding to maintain the ever-increasing number of properties on their books let alone bear the burden of trying to save private ones like Villa Macedonia. I am quite sure that given the financial support DLH would opt to take on this very important aspect of our heritage.