The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (15 page)

And yet, in contrast to Cyprus, Maltese public opinion is strongly antihunting. Along with banking, tourism is Malta's main industry, and the newspapers frequently print angry letters from tourists who have been menaced by hunters or have witnessed avian atrocities. The Maltese middle class itself is unhappy that the country's very limited open space is overrun by trigger-happy hunters who post
NO TRESPASSING
signs on public land. Unlike BirdLife Cyprus, BirdLife Malta has succeeded in enlisting prominent citizens, including the owner of the Radisson Hotel group, in a media campaign called "Reclaiming YOUR Countryside."

Malta is a two-party country, however, and because its national elections are typically decided by a few thousand votes, neither the Labor Party nor the Nationalists can afford to alienate their hunting constituents so much that they stay away from the polls. Enforcement of hunting laws therefore continues to be lax: minimal manpower is devoted to it, many local police are friendly with hunters, and even the good police can be lethargic in responding to complaints. Even when offenders are prosecuted, Maltese courts have been reluctant to fine them more than a few hundred euros.

This year the Nationalist government opened the country's spring season on quail and turtledove in defiance of a European Court of Justice ruling last fall. The EU Birds Directive permits member states to apply "derogations" and allow the killing of small numbers of protected species for "judicious use," such as control of bird flocks around airports or subsistence hunting by traditional rural communities. The Maltese government had sought a derogation for continuing the "tradition" of spring hunting, which the directive normally forbids, and the Court had ruled that Malta's proposal failed three of four tests provided by the directive: strict enforcement, small numbers, and parity with other EU member states. Regarding the fourth test, however—whether an "alternative" exists—Malta presented evidence, in the form of bag counts, that autumn hunting of quail and turtledove was not a satisfactory alternative to spring hunting. Although the government was aware that the bag counts were unreliable (the FKNK's general secretary himself once publicly admitted that the actual bag might be ten times higher than the reported count), the European Commission has a policy of trusting the data presented by the governments of member states. Malta further argued that because quail and turtledove aren't globally threatened species (they're still plentiful in Asia), they didn't merit absolute protection, and the commission's lawyers failed to point out that what counted was the species' status within the EU, where, in fact, their populations are in serious decline. The Court, therefore, while ruling against Malta and forbidding a spring hunt, did allow that it had passed one of the four tests. And the government at home proclaimed a "victory" and proceeded, in early April, to authorize a hunt.

I joined Tolga Temuge, who looks like a Turkish David Foster Wallace, on an early-morning patrol on the first day of the season. We weren't expecting to see much shooting, because the FKNK, angered by the government's terms—the season would last only six half-days, instead of the traditional six to eight weeks, and only 2,500 licenses would be granted—had organized a boycott of the season, threatening to "name and shame" any hunter who applied for a license. "The European Commission
failed,
" Temuge said as we drove the dark, dusty labyrinth of Malta's road system. "The European hunting organization and BirdLife International did a lot of hard work to arrive at sustainable hunting limits, and then Malta joins the EU, as the smallest member state, and threatens to bring down the whole edifice of the excellent Birds Directive. Malta's disregard for it is setting a bad precedent for other member states, especially in the Mediterranean, to behave the same way."

When the sky lightened, we stopped in a rough limestone lane, amid walled fields of golden hay, and listened for gunshots. I heard dogs barking, a cock crowing, trucks shifting gears, and, somewhere nearby, electronic quail song playing. Patrolling elsewhere on the island were six other of Temuge's teams, staffed mainly by foreign volunteers, with a few hired Maltese security men. As the sun came up, we began to hear distant gunshots, but not many; the country seemed essentially bird-free that morning. We proceeded through a village in which a couple of shots rang out—"Fucking unbelievable!" Temuge cried. "This is a residential area! Fucking unbelievable!"—and back into the stony maze of walls that passes for countryside in Malta. Further gunshots led us to a small field in which two men in their thirties were standing with a handheld radio. As soon as they saw us, they picked up hoes and began tending lush plantings of beans and onions. "Once you're in the area, they know," Temuge said. "Everybody knows. If they have radios, it's ninety percent sure they're hunters." It did indeed seem awfully early to be out doing hoe-work, and as long as we were standing by the field we heard no more shots. Four blazing male golden orioles flashed by, unlucky to have chosen Malta as a migratory stopover but lucky that we were standing there. In a low tree I spotted a female chaffinch, which is one of the most common birds in Europe and is all but absent in Malta, owing to the country's widespread illegal finch trapping. Temuge became very excited when I called it out. "A chaffinch!" he said. "That would be incredible, if we're starting to have breeding chaffinch here again." It was like somebody in North America being amazed to see a robin.

Maltese hunters are in the weak position of wanting something that would get Malta into real, punishable trouble with the EU: the legal right to shoot birds bound for their breeding grounds. Their leaders at the FKNK thus have little choice but to adopt uncompromising positions, such as this spring's boycott, which raises false hopes in the FKNK rank and file, fostering frustration and feelings of betrayal when, inevitably, the government disappoints them. I met with the FKNK's spokesman, Joseph Perici Calascione, a nervous but articulate man, at the organization's cramped, cluttered headquarters. "How could anybody, in their wildest imagination, expect us to be satisfied with a spring season that left eighty percent of hunters unable to get a license?" Perici Calascione said. "We've already gone two years without a season that was part of our tradition, part of our living. We weren't looking for a season as it was three years ago, but still a reasonable season, which the government had promised us in no uncertain terms before accession to the EU."

I brought up the matter of illegal shooting, and Perici Calascione offered me a Scotch. When I declined, he poured himself one. "We're completely against the illegal shooting of protected species," he said. "We're prepared to have hunting marshals in place to spot these individuals and take away their membership. And this would have been in place, had we been given a good season." Perici Calascione conceded that he was uncomfortable with the more incendiary statements of the FKNK's general secretary, but he himself became visibly distressed as he tried to convey how much hunting mattered to him; he sounded strangely like a victimized environmentalist. "Everybody is frustrated," he said, with a tremor in his voice. "Psychiatric incidents have increased, we've had suicides among our membership—our culture is threatened."

Just how much Maltese-style shooting is a "culture" and a "tradition" is debatable. While spring hunting and the killing and taxidermy of rare birds are unquestionably traditions of long standing, the phenomenon of indiscriminate slaughter seems not to have arisen until the 1960s, when Malta achieved its independence and began to prosper. Malta, indeed, represents a stark refutation of the theory that a society's affluence leads to better environmental stewardship. Affluence in Malta brought more sophisticated weapons, more money to pay taxidermists, and more cars and better roads, which made the countryside more easily accessible to hunters. Where hunting had once been a tradition handed down from father to son, it now became the pastime of young men who went out in unruly groups.

On a piece of land belonging to a hotel that hopes to build a golf course on it, I met with an old-fashioned hunter who is disgusted with his countrymen's bad behavior and with the FKNK's tolerance of it. He told me that undisciplined shooting is in the Maltese "blood" and that it was unreasonable to expect hunters to suddenly change after the country joined the EU. ("If you were born of a prostitute," he said, "you won't become a nun.") But he also put much of the blame on younger hunters and said that Malta's lowering of the hunting age from twenty-one to eighteen had made matters worse. "And now that they've changed the spring-hunting law," he said, "law-abiding people can't go out, but the indiscriminate shooters still go out, because there's not enough law enforcement. I've been in the country for three weeks this spring, and I've seen one police car."

Spring was always the main hunting season in Malta, and the hunter said that if the season is closed permanently he will probably keep hunting in the fall only as long as his two dogs live, and then quit and be just a bird watcher. "Something else is happening," he said. "Because where are the turtledoves? When I was young and going out with my father, we'd look up at the sky and see thousands of them. Now it's peak season, and I was out all day yesterday and saw twelve. I haven't seen a nightjar in two years. I haven't seen a rock thrush in five years. Last autumn, I went out every morning and afternoon looking for woodcock, with my dogs, and I saw three of them and didn't fire once. And that's part of the problem: people get frustrated. 'I don't find a woodcock, so let's shoot a kestrel.'"

Late on a Sunday afternoon, from a secluded height, Temuge and I used a telescope to spy on two men who were scanning the sky and fields with binoculars. "They're definitely hunters," Temuge said. "They keep their guns hidden until something comes by for them to shoot." But, as an hour passed and nothing came by, the men picked up rakes and began weeding a garden, only occasionally returning to their binoculars, and then another hour passed and they worked harder in the garden, because there were no birds.

 

Italy is a long, narrow gauntlet for a winged migrant to run. Poachers in Brescia, in the north, trap a million songbirds annually for sale to restaurants offering
pulenta e osei
—polenta with little birds. The woods of Sardinia are full of wire snares, the Venetian wetlands are a slaughtering ground for wintering ducks, and Umbria, the home of Saint Francis, has more registered hunters per capita than any other region. Hunters in Tuscany pursue their quotas of woodcock and wood pigeon and four legally shootable songbirds, including song thrush and skylark; but at dawn, in the mist, it's hard to distinguish legal from illegal quarry, and who's keeping track anyway? To the south, in Campania, much of which is controlled by the Camorra (the local mafia), the most inviting habitat for migratory waterfowl and waders is in fields flooded by the Camorra and rented to hunters for up to a thousand euros a day; songbird wholesalers from Brescia bring down refrigerated trucks to collect the take from small-time poachers; entire Campanian provinces are blanketed with traps for seven tuneful European finch species, and flush Camorristi pay handsomely for well-trained singers at the illegal bird markets there. Farther south, in Calabria and Sicily, the highly publicized springtime hunting of migrating honey buzzards has been reduced by intensive law enforcement and volunteer monitoring, but Calabria, especially, is still full of poachers who, if they can get away with it, will shoot anything that flies.

A curious old statute in Italy's civil code, enacted by the Fascists to encourage familiarity with firearms, gives hunters, and only hunters, the right to enter private property, regardless of who owns it, in pursuit of game. By the 1980s, there were more than two million licensed hunters running wild in the Italian countryside, which had emptied out as the population flowed into the cities. Most urban Italians dislike hunting, however, and in 1992 the Italian parliament passed one of Europe's more restrictive hunting laws, which included, most radically, a declaration that all wild fauna belong exclusively to the Italian state, thereby reducing hunting to a special concession. In the two decades since then, the populations of some of Italy's most lovable megafauna, including wolves, have rebounded spectacularly, while the number of licensed hunters has fallen below eight hundred thousand. These two trends have prompted Franco Orsi, a Ligurian senator from Silvio Berlusconi's party, to propose a law that would liberalize the use of decoy birds and expand the times and places in which hunting is permitted. A second, "communitary" law, intended to bring Italy into compliance with the Birds Directive and thereby avoid hundreds of millions of euros in fines pending against it, has just been passed by the parliament and includes at least one clear victory for hunters: a shifting of the hunting season for certain bird species into February.

I met with Orsi at his party's offices in Genoa, on the eve of regional elections that brought fresh gains for Berlusconi's coalition. Orsi, a handsome, soft-eyed man in his forties, is a passionate hunter who chooses vacation destinations on the basis of what he can shoot in them. His argument for updating the 1992 law is that it has led to an explosive increase of harmful species; that Italian hunters should be allowed to do whatever French and Spanish hunters do; that private landowners could manage land for game better than the state does; and that hunting is a socially and spiritually beneficial activity. He showed me a newspaper picture of wild boar running down a Genoese street; he described the menace posed by starlings at airports and in vineyards. But when I agreed that controlling boar and starlings is a good idea, he went on to say that hunters don't like killing boar in the season the authorities want them to. "And, anyway, I can't accept that hunting is only for wild boar, nutria, and starlings," he said. "That's something the army can do."

I asked Orsi if he favored hunting every bird species to the maximum compatible with sustaining existing numbers.