Fairy tale of Malta being on a major migration path

Barry Fox's letter Disappearing Wildlife (April 27) is typical of the brainwashed foreigner. In Britain people shoot birds all the year round, but birds still breed there in huge numbers. Therefore, it should have occurred to Mr Fox that shooting may not account for the fact that these islands are not teeming with wildlife.

Ostensibly Mr Fox stayed on for a few days to watch wildlife, but in actual fact he admits that all he did was "get (his) information from The Times of Malta, from the Għadira Nature Report 2007, from several days travelling round Malta and Gozo by bus and from visiting the Għadira Nature Reserve - where (he) saw birds such as swallows resting from their migration route". Apart from this last comment, Mr Fox says nothing about the wildlife he observed. Instead he plays the familiar anti-hunting tune, trotting out the stale news of a BirdLife nature reserve being "attacked with polluting oil bottles", the shooting of a bird warden, the virtues of EU fines and the benefits of eco-tourism.

Although Mr Fox was here at the peak of the spring bird migration, and although hunting was not permitted and there were no hunters about, he appears to have seen very few birds in the main nature reserve he visited. Yet he seems to believe in the fairy tale about Malta being on a major migration path.

Instead of listening to the ranting of anti-hunting extremists, and wasting his time travelling on buses, this high-quality tourist would have fared better had he engaged in some bird-watching of his own.

Had he done so, he might possibly have experienced things positively and gone away with good impressions rather than the bigoted views fed to him by others. Then readers would have been spared his version of a rehash of the trite anti-hunting nonsense which letters to this newspaper are becoming notorious for. And Malta's hoteliers would not be in tears at his threat to take his custom elsewhere.