Some years ago, leafing through an old Guido Lanfranco book on Maltese birds in a friend’s library, to my utter surprise I came across a reference to the blackbird.

This is the wonderful song bird you hear at dawn and at dusk all over Europe, right down to Sicily and when you hear its unmistakable song you know spring has finally arrived.

You won’t hear the blackbird in the Maltese islands, therefore, either the Lanfranco information was wrong or else the blackbird has been permanently hunted out of Malta and Gozo.

If indeed it has been hunted out, what a pity it is for our ‘noble’ hunting culture to have deprived the rest of us the enjoyment of this bird’s enchanting song – possibly another example of the minority determining environmental quality for the majority.