With a view to a kill

The drone business, in which the Germany-based Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) flew an ill-fated ‘Eye in the sky’ device over the Maltese countryside to spot bird-trapping sites, raises a number of issues.

The response by hunters who feel threatened thus has always been to go for the camera- Mark Anthony Falzon

One might group them into three categories. First, legal, on various counts. It is not clear if permission was needed to fly a small craft that actually looked more like a futuristic kite than a model plane.

CABS was also making a documentary, which links the case to broadcasting law. There may also be an obvious problem with data protection law. And so on.

The second category is that of ethics. Namely that, legal or not, there are ethical implications to filming people against their wishes. Finally there seems to be a question of fair play (and therefore also PR – but that is CABS’s problem).

Most people I spoke to thought that while it was all right to stare at hunters through binoculars, it was less nice to do so through an all-seeing drone.

The bird’s eye view changes everything, which is why there are some big debates going on about Google Earth and high-resolution military surveillance among other new technologies.

That’s the serious bit. What I really enjoyed about the incident was rather its playful side. And that’s not even going anywhere near the predictable jokes about luckless German planes, close-ups of Peter and Jane happy in the hay, and the nuances of telling a plane from a quail.

The Maltese countryside during the hunting season has become a cat-and-mouse game of surveillance and counter-espionage. Binoculars, telescopes, and high-powered zooms are everywhere, at all times.

Hunters on their part draw on a vast and ubiquitous network of good old-fashioned pairs of eyes, two-way radios, and solidarity. The upshot is that no matter how remote the location one can never be quite sure one is unwatched, either way.

That also explains why it took hunters in Mellieħa approximately zero minutes to get wind of the technological masterpiece in the skies above Delimara.

I can’t for a second believe CABS imagined they could get away with it. Or maybe that was never their intention.

There’s a background to all of this. The Times of September 23, 1968, reported a short-toed eagle gunned down the previous weekend. The report included a picture of a proud-looking taxidermist holding up the dead eagle to the camera. Which looks a mad thing to do by today’s standards, and that’s not just because the eagle is now aprotected species.

The reason why the circumstances of the picture would today be unthinkable is that bird conservation in Malta has since become a war of images. The front cover of Natalino Fenech’s iconic Fatal Flight, published in 1992, had a picture of a healthy-looking Osprey just below the sub-title, ‘The Maltese obsession with killing birds’.

The back cover featured an Alpine Swift lying belly up next to a spent cartridge – just the sort of image we’ve come to associate with the work of the bird protection lobby. The more colourful the bird, the more horrific the wound, all the better for the ‘good cause’.

Given the amount of legislationand enforcement we’ve seen since the late 1970s or so I figure the images did their job rather well.

It was bound to happen. Bird-watching is very much about binoculars and cameras - optics that ‘record’, in two senses. First, they produce an identification and therefore a ‘record’ by bringing birds closer. Second, they record by putting on film. It was always going to be one small step to go from that to recording hunters and trappers and peddling the images.

Not that hunters took it passively. Their word for the constant surveillance is ‘sikkatura’, as in the opposition breathing down one’s neck. Fenech’s book includes what must be one of the most unlikely pictures in the history of publishing: that of a hunter mooning the photographer.

Many hunters also claim that Birdlife is in the habit of fabricating images. The people from ‘Birdlies’, as they like to put it, simply wheel out a dead bird or two from the freezer at the start of every season, just to jog public sympathy.

It didn’t do much for the drone’s future that CABS members happen to be foreigners. Hunters have had stacks of bad press from ‘outsiders’, be they tourists or British conservation NGOs. I find the tourism link quite fascinating. Like birdwatchers, tourists carry a camera and make images as a matter of course. I’ve seen tourist guide books that warn the reader to point elsewhere or risk some serious damage.

I don’t really know why tourists find Maltese hunters so photogenic. I suspect it has to do with notions of Mediterranean lawlessness, à la Coppola filming the Mafia in the parched Sicilian countryside.

Or maybe it’s just an inversion of logic from the filmed (and usually staged) tiger shoots in the Raj, which were meant to be a thinly-veiled reference to the British taming of the Indian spirit.

Be that as it may, the response by hunters who feel threatened thus has always been to go for the camera. Meaning that the ultimate conservation image (and paradox) is of hunters trying to stop people from making images.

There is some telling stuff on YouTube showing scuffles to the sound of ‘ħudhielu, ħudhielu’ (‘take his camera’). For local (and field-wiser) birdwatchers, high-power zooms have pretty much solved the problem.

I earlier said I can’t believe CABS thought the drone would go unnoticed. My gut feeling is that it didn’t necessarily. Images matter as a conservation tool, but so does the performance of their making. Or unmaking.

The drone is alleged to have been shot down on the second day and I expect CABS has some good takes of the event.

mafalzon@hotmail.com