The two sides in the spring hunting debate have now put forward their various viewpoints. Around the core arguments there has been much scaremongering about threats to ‘minorities’ matched by protests against exclusion from the spring countryside. Spring in these islands, said one side, coincides with the April hunting season: a claim rubbished by the other side by pointing out that the spring season extends over “just 20 half days”, forgetting it had been just 10 half days in 2005.

The legal position has been variously interpreted. Fact: there is no mention of a spring hunting derogation in the Malta-EU accession treaty. The only ‘bird matter’ specifically mentioned had to do with the trapping of song birds due to be (as it was) phased out by 2007, only to be revived abusively for the 2014 autumn season, with the totally fantastic “allowed quota of 26,850 birds” of various species. The re-introduction coincided with the change of Environment Commissioner: Janez Potocnik to Karmenu Vella, accidentally of course. But the letter sent to the electorate before the EU referendum by then prime minister Eddie Fenech Adami said quite clearly that nothing was going to change in the hunting scene as Malta would be applying a derogation for quail and turtle dove.

And Malta did indeed operate a derogation in 2005, 2006 and 2007, at which point it was hauled up in front of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and found guilty of not “affording enough protection for the birds during the spring migration”.

This was generally taken to mean lax policing and no well-defined parameters for applying the derogation. Yet there was no clear and unequivocal ban of a derogation and the ECJ reckoned that as there was an absence of an alternative satisfactory solution a derogation would be justified. The ECJ and later Commissioner Potocnik used autumn bag figures rather than migration numbers for this conclusion.

So Malta tightened the rules, increased oversight, worked out quotas and continued to operate a derogation for quail and turtle doves, notice of intent being given every year. Yet there was ample reason to believe that all was not well in the State of Denmark, enough to justify the call for an abrogative referendum.

There is now other evidence to hand which should shake the ECJ out of its lethargy. The basis of the derogation – the dearth of birds during autumn compared to a spring migration – is not, as the hunters insist, a fixed feature of bird migration. For autumn 2014 – the first time there was an actual count of migrating birds – there was a much heavier quail passage than for spring of same year, even if turtle dove numbers were less.

The reported bag was rather small. Hunters seemed to have stayed at home or were hit by bad weather; flocks of quail perversely passed over on Sunday afternoons, or on the days when the season was forcibly closed. These latter ‘reasons’ at least are disproved by the migration observations which show large numbers of quail transiting before the closure. Heavy under-reporting is a much more likely explanation.

There is no mention of a spring hunting derogation in the accession treaty

Arguments that the very heavy punishments make under-reporting too risky are futile given the depleted Administrative Law Enforcement section of the police force. Autumn under-reporting has two ‘advantages’. The first is that the spring quota is based on the previous autumn bag: a low autumn catch translates into a high spring allowance. In the absence of independent information, a small autumn bag emphasises the inadequacy of the autumn migration. The 2014 observations have dented this position.

There is also a problem with spring reporting. The SMS reports show rather low values for most of the 20-day season and then a strong spike over the last two or three days. That again points to under-reporting, in this case to make sure that the ‘season’ does not come to a premature end through the quota being reached early on. A written warning to be careful in their reporting from the FKNK to its members was hurriedly withdrawn, “to avoid misunderstandings”.

As far as general population effects are concerned arguments are less clear, with an amount of cherry-picking on both sides.

Hunters point to the general agreement that European populations are still very high and the overall changes of the last couple of decades make the species one of “least concern”. Even a full quota catch would still leave it well under the one per cent of population deemed to define the level of concern.

There are potential flaws in these arguments. The first comes from general under-reporting, which keeps the bag numbers well away from the one per cent level. But comparison with the ‘bags’ of other countries glosses over the fact that these latter refer to an autumn catch only. But ours includes (under-reported) autumn and spring bags with the latter having a double effect.

Taking the accepted equivalence that 3.5 million pairs represent 10.5 million individuals, the spring bag taken as ‘pairs’ should be multiplied by four or five to give a more proper indication of the effects on population, given the potential loss of nestlings. Spring bags therefore assume a significantly greater import than that conveyed by just the reported catch. And the drop in overall numbers of the two species the ‘No’ camp mentions has reached significant levels.

There is no reason to accept the view that the call for an abrogative referendum on spring hunting constitutes an insult to the ECJ or that, as Paul Fava put it in The Sunday Times of Malta on March 22, “if the coalition wins the… referendum it would have beaten the two political parties in Parliament, and moreover would have governed instead of the elected government.”

It seems to have escaped him that “the two political parties in Parliament” and “the elected government” were put there by many members of the coalition among others. Precisely that we may be ‘Maltin u Ewropei’, the vote in the referendum should be a resounding ‘No’.

Edward Mallia is a retired astrophysicist and lifelong environmentalist.

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