The birds belong to us all

During my recent trip to Malta, where I assisted in protecting migrant birds on their way to their winter quarters in Europe, I daily ran the gamut of verbal abuse from Maltese hunters.

In the online comments to our YouTube filming of the shooting down of a black stork we were invited - inter alia - to "go to Auschwitz-Birkenau and take a video there. I've heard that back in the day there used to be a lot of massacres there too".

I was named after my great uncle Sheya (the prophet Isaiah in Yiddish) Hasten, who was murdered along with the majority of my family in Nazi Europe.

I am also a proud and active member of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (Cabs) and work for BirdLife International all year long as a field ornithologist.

In the last passing days I stood among friends from Poland, Germany, Britain, the US, Italy and Malta and saw with my own eyes hundreds of wild birds, some of great rarity, being shot down, most of them just for the fun of it; no one bothered to even pick them up.

I have been to many hunting zones around the region, including the death fields of Cyprus and the killing hills of northern Italy but I've never seen anything like the slaughter on Malta. It's time to stop the lies: killing every-thing that moves is no Maltese tradition; the majority of the people of Malta see it as (and I quote) "a barbaric crazy bunch who carry guns for the last few decades".

It is not an ancient tradition; the barbaric hunting of everything that moves has never been the tradition.

To call Cabs Nazis or to send us to Auschwitz-Birkenau is beneath contempt - the evil of one cannot excuse the villainy of the other.

All the hunters who read this letter should ask themselves: Is there any other country in Europe or the world where you hear more gunshots than bird songs?

I'm Jewish, I'm a Cabs member and don't bother to send me to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I'm the living evidence that we've survived that as well (this goes to the coward who shot at us in Miżieb early in the morning of September 20).

Oh, and before they start writing stuff on Israeli-Palestinian relations, I've already asked my Palestinian colleague to attend our next camp on Malta.

Stop blaming others; it's your own country you destroy but the birds belong to all!