Hunters are out of sync with the feelings of most Maltese if they believe hunting can regain the social status it once enjoyed. The bad among the hunters have done so much harm to their collective image that it is difficult to imagine it can ever be rehabilitated.
They have done considerable damage not only to their image but also to that of their country, today renowned as a place where anything that flies has little hope of surviving if it gets within the range of a hunter.
Their federation, which, ironically, has the word conservation in its title, can protest at this assessment until their leaders are blue in the face, but far too many breaches of the rules have been committed by hunters over the years for people not to think badly of them.
Take, for instance, the plight of the wild flamingo that has just sought refuge in a bird park at Salina. What is it that makes some people want to kill such a beautiful bird? Do hunters have any idea of the outrage that the attempt by some of them to kill the bird has stirred? Something similar happened last June at the salt pans in Salina. The story repeats itself so many times that one can hardly blame people for expressing disgust.
The irony is that this latest episode of a wanton urge to destroy a thing of beauty comes at a time when Birdlife announced that the channel between Malta and Gozo has been designated as the country’s first important marine bird area, putting Malta on the map alongside the Galapagos and the Azores as a refuge for threatened wildlife.
There is no doubt that many people would have been unaware of such an important bird refuge area in Malta, and Birdlife’s announcement must have counter-balanced, to a degree, the anger that some hunters’ urge to kill the wild flamingo has generated throughout the island. Birdlife said the designation was given in recognition of the island’s international importance for two global and one regional threatened bird species.
The red-listed Yelkouan shearwater and the larger Scopoli’s shearwater at Rdum tal-Madonna in Malta and Ta’ Ċenċ in Gozo make use of the channel, congregating over the water in large numbers before returning to the nearby cliff-side nest sites to take their turn incubating their eggs or feeding chicks. The channel is also a migration route for the ferruginous duck.
According to Birdlife, the designation of the site follows an assessment of a proposal which it had submitted in 2011 against internationally-recognised criteria established by Birdlife International’s IBA Programme.
This is most uplifting news, more so at the opening of the autumn hunting season when, as in the past, the country expects to see flagrant disregard of the rules, which this year have even been relaxed, not in favour of the birds but of the hunters, who now have more time to shoot down birds at the peak of the bird migration period.
The curfew has been extended from 3pm to 7pm, and the shooting period by a week. It seems neither birds nor irregular migrants have any business coming our way: Malta is tagħna biss (for us alone)! Meanwhile, the Government says it is going to beef up enforcement. Yes, we will have a few arrests here and there, but these will only represent the tip of the iceberg.