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Joe Sultana, John J. Borg: History of Ornithology in Malta.
Birdlife Malta, 2015. 390 pp.
In his foreword to this book, Mark-Anthony Falzon observes that a history of ornithology is also a history of loss. In the bird kingdom, the loss is tangible and distressing.
This great book on the inquisitiveness of man in Malta about its birds atones, as far as anything human could, for this deep sense of failure where the conservation of nature is concerned. And for our deeper guilt and shame, I could add.
Man, however, primitive, has always surrendered to a disturbing, competitive rapport with birds, to fantasise about an impossible bird-man – most Supermen fly, as you’ve noticed. From the mythical legends of Icarus, when the overweening pride of the sentient being demanded man with wings to soar with the birds, to the belief that God’s most perfect creatures, the angels, were beings with avian wings, to Leonardo’s visions of flying men giving the finger to the laws of gravity.
We envy birds, their infallible beauty, their levitation, their timeless song – this envy perhaps explains why for centuries we have conspired with such criminal abandon to destroy them.
The birds of Malta only captured the attention of the enquiring mind as late as 1575, four years after the epochal battle of Lepanto. Before that, they had been present in our iconography, from Neolithic times as objects of cult and in our place names from time immemorial, but never as objects of study.
A focused inquisitiveness on them in Malta only started with the Frenchman André Thevet, a monk of Francis of Assisi, the mystic who preached lovingly to the birds in the sky, followed by an encyclopaedic German, Hieronimous Megiser.
The first Maltese to show any curiosity at all in ornithology came much later: Gio Francesco Abela in 1647, with his Descrittione di Malta, the original ‘why-I’m-proud-to-be-Maltese’ book in history. One of the reasons for Abela’s pride is found in the exuberant and assorted avian fauna he observed and listed. He fails to mention if he was also proud of its systematic slaughter. Malta never had anything approaching the Persian Canticle of Birds.
Flawless research put in over many years of passionate study
Since Abela, the level of Maltese interest in native ornithology has fluctuated, from periods of intense weariness to others of consuming wariness. Foreigners who loved and studied Malta’s birds were more predominant than natives, up to relatively recently. Antonio Schembri (1813 –1872) stands as a beacon and a turning point. He dedicated a lifetime’s labour to the scientific pursuit of his naturalist cravings. He worked in symbiosis with a most eminent natural scientist, Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who, as a little boy, had been imprisoned in Malta in San Anton’s Palace with his father Lucien, Napoleon’s brother. Like his uncle, Charles Lucien achieved world distinction, but as a scientist, being known, perhaps with some wanton flattery, as the Emperor of Nature. That baton was then picked up by many others, and today is proudly in the hands of its grand trustees, Joe Sultana and John J. Borg.
The history of ornithology in Malta strides in parallel with scientific advance, of improved methods, of higher technology. But it also is a history of human meanness, of rivalries, of resented plagiarisms, like when the gifted British amateur William Medlycott lifted and published Schembri’s ornithological work, passing it off as his own, without acknowledgement. This miffed Schembri considerably.
The hardly-concealed jealousies between Charles A. Wright, Gavino Gulia and Andrew Leith Adams to assert their primacy in the observation of Maltese avifauna have left acrid traces in the records.
The recurrent curiosity in the birds of the Maltese islands followed the paths of other ‘curiosities’, not dissimilar to archaeology. At first, both disciplines were inspired by the collection of objects, rare, beautiful, unusual, to display for the admiration, and possibly envy, of others. Killing the birds was the necessary prerequisite. Over the years, and with the advancement of scientific method, the bird itself became only one of the many players in the grander scheme of things: observing its life-cycle, its habitat, its biology and genetics, its palaeontology, its migratory patterns, became much more important than owning it by killing it, stuffing it and gawking at it. The taxidermist, who before had posed as the scientist’s friend, has now turned into his enemy.
What a marvellous book this is. Reviewers always, consciously or subconsciously, want to discover some fault in the book assessed, if only to prove to themselves how fairly and thoroughly they have done their job. In this case I fail. The flawless research put in over many years of passionate study by Sultana and Borg, their infectively engrossing story-telling, the lavish illustrations, the rich editorial standards kept up through the publication leave me with precious nothing to gripe about, and with plenty to applaud. My only disappointment.
The loud, unwritten plea underlying this book is to treasure our endangered biodiversity. Those of us who are not ungrateful for the gifts that nature lavishes on an uncaring mankind, lost one battle on April 11, 2015, a black, thankless, tragic day.
But there are many still fighting the good fight. May their spirit soar higher than the crested eagle’s and the range of the shotguns of evolutionary retards.