Great! What a sight greeted me on my penultimate day in Malta before heading back to Australia. The Times (September 14) carried on the front page a photograph in vivid colour of a kingfisher, apparently still alive, with half its beak shot off. On page 4 there were photos of a dying night heron with half its guts hanging out and a dead hoopoe.

A few days earlier I had watched a kingfisher at Is-Simar reserve, in company with Joe Mangion, president of Birdlife Malta. It perched on a dead branch, then hovered briefly over a pool before diving so swiftly that it literally disappeared from sight. This living jewel could well have been the one featured in The Times.

Do readers realise the harm such pictures and the accompanying reports of illegal hunting and trapping are doing to Malta's reputation? Those who refuse to believe they are having a detrimental effect on the tourism industry are just fools.

Back in 1962, when I helped found the Malta Ornithological Society (now Birdlife Malta), hunting and trapping were rampant in the Maltese islands. Despite new hunting regulations and the commendable efforts of the understaffed ALE forces, despite Malta's accession to the European Union, the situation has not improved.

The Maltese are a cultured people and it pains me to see this barbarism being enacted in Malta. There are about 12,000 registered hunters and God knows how many trappers in the Maltese islands yet membership of Birdlife Malta is a paltry 3,000 or thereabouts. I urge those who have any feeling at all for birds and the natural environment to join this worthy organisation. They do not have to take part in its activities which, by the way, are many and varied. Their subscription alone will go a long way to keeping it solvent in its struggle to bring about change.