Hadoram Shirihai is fresh off a boat trip to photograph European storm-petrels in Malta and he is excited.
"We had a pod of common dolphins, 25 of them, circling close to us and fishing with the shearwaters. The birds were feeding among the dolphins and picking off the fish they missed.
We could have watched them all day, they were so close... but we had to go on to find the storm-petrels."
When a man like Shirihai is excited about birding in Malta, you know it's serious. Shirihai is a heavyweight ornithologist from Israel, widely acknowledged as the foremost middle-eastern authority on birds. His published works include The Birds of Israel which was awarded the Best Bird Book of the Year by British Birds and Birdwatch.
He also won awards for A Complete Guide to Antarctic Wildlife, while The Macmillan Birder's Guide to European and Middle Eastern Birds is a summary of 30 years of field research. Among these achievements, he recently rediscovered Beck's Petrel which was believed to be extinct for around 80 years.
Last week, he flew to Malta specifically to meet John J. Borg of Heritage Malta and the EU LIFE Yelkouan Shearwater Project so that he could be shown the very special storm-petrels that breed on Filfla. His enthusiasm for the seabird population here in the islands was infectious.
"What a trip!" he enthused. "We left port at 4.30 a.m. and headed straight out beyond Filfla. Mr Borg has a secret recipe which he puts into the water to tempt the birds in and we spent a lot of time bobbing on the sea with the birds just out of range of the camera. The Cory's and Yelkouan Shearwaters came close to the boat, but the storm-petrels were more wary."
Mr Borg said: "Every time we swung round to get close, they backed away, 'running' on the waves before take off, as if they were teasing us. These birds are camera shy that is why getting a good photo of them at sea is such a prize."
Having seen just a little bit of what Malta has to offer, Shirihai feels that the islands have the potential to be one of the top birding destinations in Europe in terms of migration.
"I can see the parallels in Malta with the birding situation in Eilat in Israel in the 1970s," he says. At that time, birding tourism was just about to start its meteoric rise up the economic agenda. Could birdwatching in Malta see a similar explosion in popularity in the coming years?
The renowned ornithologist and author of a number of bird and wildlife guides has no doubt that birding and eco-tourism could take off in Malta in a big way if correctly managed.
"I set up the first birdwatching centre in Israel. At its peak, we had 10,000 birders coming in spring from all over the world. We employed 40 workers and bird-watchers were among the biggest customers of one of the world's top car hire firms."
Shirihai feels that there is no reason why we could not have the same situation in Malta. For a number of people it means a good amount of revenue - especially when people are willing to pay top dollar to guides and hotels in order to find the birds they want to see.
Shirihai is already planning his next trip to Malta, hoping to arrive next month to finally snap those elusive storm-petrels so that they can feature in his current work, a handbook on seabirds which is still a work in progress.
And where Shirihai goes, other birders are sure to follow - the future of eco-tourism in Malta just got rosier.
Ms Raine is EU LIFE, Project Manager