Marshals and the shot birds found in Miżieb

Henry Fenech Azzopardi in his letter of January 25 once again made several false claims about BirdLife Malta. I will set the record straight.

First, although he is a member of the Maltese Ornis Committee and has thus been included in the Ornis discussions on the FKNK "self-regulation" proposal, Mr Fenech Azzopardi wrongly states that the FKNK has never said that the "marshals" will report to FKNK and not the police.

Facts speak for themselves so here is the relevant part of the FKNK proposal sent to the Attorney General by the Secretary of the Ornis Committee on July 26, 2007:

"The FKNK appoints a disciplinary board according to how it is provided in the FKNK statute... In each zone the FKNK appoints a number of Marshals which will only be known to the FKNK. The Marshals report directly to the disciplinary board. The board must discuss each case brought to it and may send for who was reported on.... The board may, if it agrees, and according to the seriousness of the report being investigated, forward the report to the Police."

Next, Mr Fenech Azzopardi refers to a statement by the Assistant Police Commissioner allegedly saying that "this year is not worse than last year in terms of illegal hunting". Mr Fenech Azzopardi should also note that he did not say that the situation was better either. BirdLife Malta's press release of January 5 states that "Analysis of shot protected birds shows no improvement over the last three years". So, actually BirdLife and the police apparently seem to agree that the illegal hunting situation in Malta is as bad as it was in previous years.

Moreover, Mr Fenech Azzopardi makes the allegation that the shot birds found in Miżieb were counted according to the pieces (found) and not the corpse itself. As we did not see Mr Fenech Azzopardi at Miżieb while BirdLife and CABS were searching the area in the company of ALE officers for two days last September, we do not know how he can claim to know how the remains of the birds were counted.

For the benefit of Mr Fenech Azzopardi, so that he can get his facts straight, in reality photos of every single find were taken as evidence. Corpses that were recently killed and intact were counted as a single bird. In the case of bodies that were more than a few weeks old, identification of the number of bodies (and the species) was based on the number of skulls present, or if no skulls were present then the number of sternum (the chest bone). Therefore they were indeed counted by the number of birds, and not pieces as Mr Azzopardi wrongly claims. All these remains were handed over to the police who also noted down each find on official police receipts which BirdLife has retained.

BirdLife has prepared a detailed report on the Miżieb find and handed this over to the authorities last October. Both BirdLife and CABs had demanded that the results of the limited police/Mepa investigation to determine the cause of mortality, based on the bird corpses and other remains found so far, be made public without delay. BirdLife and CABS also demanded that the remaining area in the Miżieb woodland should also be searched by the police - something that to date has not been done.

Finally, Mr Azzopardi should note that BirdLife is against spring hunting not only because of the illegal killing of protected birds (as he claims) but for a number of reasons. In fact, these are the same reasons why the Birds Directive does not permit hunting in spring. Of all the reasons, perhaps the most important one is that spring hunting could never be considered to be "sustainable" hunting. No self-respecting hunter would kill wild species before they are about to reproduce. It is entirely nonsensical and counter-productive.