When I was a university student, it was still reasonably easy to find a parking slot on the ring road without having to get there at sunrise. The cars parked in the vicinity of the lecture halls and the main quadrangle weren’t the dinky smart models you see today. Mostly, they were second-hand Fiats, with the occasional Peugeot making an appearance.

And then, looming high above our mini-mobiles – there was one camouflage-coloured Land Rover. The mud-splashed giant belonged to a fellow law student – a keen hunter. The eight o’clock lectures were always a bit touch and go for him. During the hunting season, he would disappear, resurfacing weeks later to pick up a haul of missed transcriptions.

A group of us were members of the Malta Ornithological Society (MOS) – the precursor of Birdlife Malta – and there was a lot of good-natured bantering between us. He would call us “mogħoż” (goats) in a play on the MOS acronym and we would retaliate by slapping round MOS stickers on his lecture notes and on his car in the hope of shaming him with his fellow hunters.

At times, our discussions would take a more serious turn and we would talk about the future of birds and hunting.

He was no fool and admitted that if indiscriminate hunting continued unabated, it would have a terrible effect on the bird population – especially on the number of turtle doves as these are killed as they migrate to nest and lay eggs during the spring hunting season.

However, we could never agree as to how the problem could be tackled. My friend shrugged it off, saying the situation would take care of itself as future generations were growing up to be more conservation-minded and that they would shun pastimes such as hunting. As an example, he would mention his much younger sister who was then still a primary school pupil. She would burst into tears when his hunting outings were successful.

Several times she would wake up early to hide his car keys – her own little attempt at bird protection and conservation. According to my friend, his sister and her generation would be the ones to solve the over-hunting problem.

It was unreasonable of us to expect anything sooner – he would tell us. The passion for hunting was too deeply ingrained, the bird population was not yet critical and anyway there were more important things to fret about than the possible elimination of a bird species. Tomorrow’s generation would take care of it.

That kind of response made me – and still makes me – immeasurably sad. Not only because it’s leaving it up to our children and their children to solve the problems we create but also because it may be too late for them to do anything about them. The decisions we take now will be crucial in ensuring that there are birds to save tomorrow. The urgency of the situation cannot be understated.

It is this sense of urgency which has made me regard the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition with a deep sense of disappointment

I hate sensationalism and doom-mongering but there are recent studies which show that turtle dove numbers in Britain have dropped by 93 per cent since 1970. A paper in the British journal Bird Study, by two RSPB research scientists Jenny Dunn and Antony Morris, said that: “At the current rate of decline, turtle doves may be lost as a UK breeding bird by 2021.”

Turtle doves are the mostly affected of the migratory birds that spend the winter in Africa and fly to Britain in the springtime to breed. Our spring hunting season coincides with turtle dove migration when they are on their way to rest. Downing them at that point means that they will have no offspring.

The referendum on spring hunting (hunting in autumn will continue) is intended to prevent just this – the killing of birds on their way to lay young. Now Maltese hunters argue that they are not solely to blame and that – the decline in the turtle dove numbers is due to other factors such as loss of habitat due to deforestation and questionable agricultural practices in other countries.

While there may be some truth in this, the fact remains that killing birds on their way to breed is one major reason for their decline. If we can contribute towards preventing this, we should – especially if the restriction is limited to the spring hunting season.

Time is of the essence. We have a unique opportunity to save species for our generation, for our children and also (although this may sound ironic) for hunters – because if we don’t put a stop to the unsustainable spring hunting now, there may be no birds flying overhead tomorrow.

It is this sense of urgency which has made me regard the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition with a deep sense of disappointment and has redimensioned them as smaller men in my eyes. They cannot reasonably consider the options of contributing to the extinction of species and stopping this from happening as being a purely subjective choice, like plumping for a blue tie instead of a yellow one.

This choice, their leadership and their example (or their lack of it) will have consequences for the rest of us and for future generations. They know this. They also know that there is no effective law enforcement, so when they say they are in favour of a strictly controlled spring hunting season, they know they are not talking about an imaginary state of affairs. And yet they continue to do so.

I don’t think I can take the hypocrisy of those selfies they take with schoolchildren. You know the ones –where they squat to child height, put an arm around them and flash the Whitney Houston “I believe children are the future” smile when they know that their refusal and their small-mindedness is depriving those children from the wonder and diversity of nature which they deserve.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt.