A total of 24 suspected offenders were apprehended in connection with 30 offences committed during the first nine days of the spring hunting season, the government said yesterday.

While 24 of these offences were considered minor, there were six violations deemed to be of a more serious nature including shooting protected species and hunting in prohibited areas such as bird sanctuaries.

In a statement the government said that since the start of the season on April 12, some 70 law enforcement officers from the police and armed forces had carried out hundreds of patrols and more than 1,000 spot checks. The officers are deployed between 5am and 2pm.

Further patrols were carried out at specific locations at night. In addition, officials from the Wild Birds Regulation Unit provided 24-hour technical assistance and carried out separate field inspections.

A drone was also deployed in a dozen sorties over certain locations outside hunting hours.

Meanwhile, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter yesterday claimed that hunters had deployed hundreds of illegal electronic devices intended to lure quail and protected waders.

CABS said this estimate was based on spot checks carried out by its volunteers during the previous four nights in which 72 devices were located.

“As our survey only covered a small part of the island the number of callers heard by our teams is only a small percentage of the true figure. A realistic guess would be in the low hundreds,” CABS operations officer Axel Hirschfeld said.

He also remarked that the police had not managed to confiscate any devices even though they had been alerted several times.

“The fact that such a large-scale illegality goes unpunished is absolutely irreconcilable with any zero tolerance policy or strict supervision which is one of the conditions of the derogation for spring hunting,” Mr Hirschfeld said.

CABS said the major problem was that the police from the Administrative Law Enforcement unit were not on patrol before 5am and that the police were seemingly unwilling to deal with the situation.

It said that these devices were being ‘locked’ in metal boxes or in used oil drums either embedded in or filled with concrete, to make it hard for the authorities to confiscate them.

CABS also reported that last Saturday one of its teams filmed two hunters allegedly shooting three quails each near Buskett Gardens, thus exceeding the daily bag limit of two birds per hunter.

According to CABS both men failed to report their catch by SMS as required by law and are expected to be prosecuted.