Wherever we travel in the world, birds are the first and most accessible wildlife we see. They become latticed into our sense of geographic identity. To me, a European summer is scribbling swifts.
Australia is an omnipresent ibis. Coming home is hearing the peal of a tui, a music unique to New Zealand. And Malta?
Malta is becoming known internationally as the place where they shoot birds. All sorts of birds. Protected species, other country's birds, the rarer the better. Environmental scientists already have a clear picture that a sweep of migratory avian species are flying into an uncertain future: dwindling, from Britain to Europe to Asia, in the face of serious environmental disruption.
It doesn't take a genius to work out that it makes no sense to shoot down these irreplaceable treasures before they've even had a chance to breed. Yet in Malta, when environmentalists step up to advocate for the birds and the laws that were designed to conserve them, the aggrieved poachers and their sympathisers - a stroppy minority, it seems - reduce arguments to an illogical sense of indignation at being told to obey the law in their own country.
Malta deserves to be known internationally for its unique culture, absorbing history and generous people. Instead, the country's reputation is being tarnished - and its own people tyrannised, as far as I can see - by an out-of-control subculture.
As far afield as my dining-room table in New Zealand, the world reads of the latest unconscionable act of violence against a ranger, of Maltese citizens afraid to reclaim and use their precious reserves for fear of armed poachers, of a fence-sitting government failing to rein in serious transgressions of national and international law and, at the heart of it all, the continued mindless killing of birds.
The problem of diminishing wildlife can only be tackled transnationally, and Malta has a valuable and welcome role to play. But it is Maltese people - and the government they elect - who must act to conserve their reputation as a lawful community and sane destination, let alone Malta's indisputable importance as a migratory pit stop during one of the world's great natural phenomena.
Is it only certain Maltese who cannot see they are shooting down the very thing that makes them special?