The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (16 page)

"Let's imagine fauna as capital that every year produces interest," he said. "If I spend the interest, I can still keep the capital, and the future of the species and of hunting will be preserved."

"But there's also the investment strategy of reinvesting part of the interest, to grow the capital," I said.

"That depends on each species. There's an optimal density for each one, and some have a density that's larger than optimal, others smaller. So hunting has to regulate the balance."

My impression, from earlier visits to Italy, was that its avian populations are pretty much all suboptimal. Since Orsi didn't seem to share it, I asked him how he thought hunting harmless birds benefited society. To my surprise, he quoted Peter Singer, the author of
Animal Liberation,
to the effect that if every man had to kill the animals he eats, we would all be vegetarians. "In our urban society, we've lost the relationship between man and animal which has elements of violence," Orsi said. "When I was fourteen, my grandfather made me kill a chicken, which was the family tradition, and now every time I eat chicken I remember that it was an animal. To go back to Peter Singer, the overconsumption of animals in our society corresponds to an overconsumption of resources. Huge amounts of space are devoted to wasteful, industrialized farming, because we've lost a sense of rural identity. We shouldn't think that hunting is the only form of human violence against the environment. And hunting, in this sense, is educational."

I thought Orsi had a point, but to the Italian environmentalists I spoke with, his rhetoric proved only that he was skilled at handling journalists. Behind the national push to liberalize hunting laws, the
ambientalisti
all see the hand of Italy's large arms and munitions industry. As one of them said to me, "When somebody asks you what your business produces, do you say, 'Land mines that blow up Bosnian children,' or do you say, 'Traditional shotguns for people who enjoy waiting at dawn in a wetland for the ducks to come'?"

It's impossible to know how many birds are shot in Italy. The annual reported take of song thrushes, for example, ranges from three million to seven million, but Fernando Spina, a senior scientist at Italy's environmental-protection agency, considers these numbers "hugely conservative," since only the most conscientious hunters fill out their game cards correctly, local game authorities lack the manpower to police the hunters, the provincial databases are largely uncomputerized, and most local Italian hunting authorities routinely ignore requests for data. What is known is that Italy is a crucial migratory flyway. Banded birds have been recovered there from every country in Europe, thirty-eight countries in Africa, and six in Asia. And return migration begins in Italy very early, in some cases as early as late December. The EU's Birds Directive protects all birds on return migration, permitting hunting only within the limits of natural autumn mortality, and most responsible hunters therefore believe that the season should end on December 31. Italy's new communitary law goes the other way, however, and extends the season into February. Since early-return migrants tend to be the fittest of their species, the new law makes targets of precisely those birds with the best chance of breeding success. A longer season also protects poachers of protected species, because an illegal gunshot sounds just like a legal one. And without good data, nobody can say whether a region's annual bag limit on a species falls within natural mortality. "The bag limit is an arbitrary number, set by local officials," Spina said. "It has no relation to actual census numbers."

Although habitat loss is the biggest reason that European bird populations are collapsing, Italian-style hunting (
caccia selvaggia,
"wild hunting," its detractors call it) adds particular insult to the injury. When I asked Fulco Pratesi, a former big-game hunter who founded WWF Italy and who now considers hunting "a mania," why Italian hunters are so wild to kill birds, he cited his countrymen's love of weapons, their attachment to an "attitude of virility," their delight in breaking laws, and, strangely, their love of being in nature. "It's like a rapist who loves women but expresses it in a violent and perverse way," Pratesi said. "Birds that weigh twenty-two grams are being shot with thirty-two-gram ammunition." Italians, he added, more easily feel affection for "symbolic" animals like wolves and bears and have actually done a better job of protecting them than the rest of Europe has. "But birds are invisible," he said. "We don't see them, we don't hear them. In northern Europe, the arrival of migrating birds is visible and audible, and it moves people. Here, people live in cities and large housing complexes, and birds are literally up in the air."

For most of its history, Italy was visited every spring and fall by unimaginable numbers of packets of flying protein, and, unlike northern Europe, where people learned to see the correlation between overharvesting and diminishing returns, supplies seemed limitless in the Mediterranean. A poacher from Reggio di Calabria, still bitter about being forbidden to shoot honey buzzards, said to me, "We were only killing about twenty-five hundred a spring in Reggio, out of a total passage of sixty to a hundred thousand—it wasn't a big deal." The only way he could understand the banning of his sport was in terms of money. He told me, in all seriousness, that certain organizations that wanted to tap into state money had set themselves up as antipoachers, and that it was their need for poachers to oppose which had led to the writing of antipoaching laws. "And now these people are getting rich with money from the state," he explained.

In one of the southern provinces, I got to know an impishly boyish ex-poacher named Sergio. He'd been well into middle age before giving up poaching, feeling that he'd finally outgrown that stage of life, and he now tells stories of his "sins of youth" for comic effect. Going hunting at night was always illegal but never a problem, Sergio said, if your poaching companions were the parish priest and the brigadier of the local carabiniere. The brigadier was especially helpful in discouraging forest rangers from patrolling in their neighborhood. One night when Sergio was out hunting with him, they froze a barn owl in the headlights of the brigadier's Jeep. The brigadier told Sergio to shoot it. When Sergio demurred, the brigadier took out a shovel, walked around behind the owl, and whacked it on the head. Then he put it in the rear compartment of the Jeep.

"Why?" I asked Sergio. "Why did he want to kill the owl?"

"Because we were poaching!"

At the end of the night, when the brigadier opened the rear compartment, the owl, which had only been stunned, flew up and attacked him—Sergio spread his arms and made a ridiculously ferocious face to show me how.

For Sergio, the point of poaching had always been eating. He taught me a rhyme in his local dialect, which approximately translates:
For meat of the feather, eat a crow; for a heart that's kind, love a crone.
"You can cook crow for six days, and it's still tough," he told me. "But it's not bad in a broth. I also ate badger and fox—I ate everything." The only bird that no Italian seems interested in eating is the seagull. Even the honey buzzard, although southern families traditionally kept one specimen stuffed and mounted in the best room of their house (its local nickname is
adorno,
for "adornment"), was eaten as a springtime treat; the poacher in Reggio gave me his recipe for fricasseeing it with sugar and vinegar.

Italian wild hunters who, unlike Sergio, haven't outgrown the pursuit and who are frustrated by declining game populations and increasing state restrictions, have learned to go elsewhere in the Mediterranean for a thrill. On the Campanian seacoast, I spoke with a gap-toothed, gleefully unrepentant young-old poacher who, now that he can no longer set up a blind on the beach and shoot unlimited numbers of arriving migrants, contents himself with looking forward to vacations in Albania, where you can still shoot as much as you can find of whatever you want, whenever you want, for a very low fee. Although hunters from all nations go abroad, the Italians are widely considered to be the worst. The wealthiest of them go to Siberia to shoot woodcock during their springtime display flights or to Egypt, where, I was told, you can hire a local police officer to fetch your kills while you shoot ibises and globally threatened duck species until your arms are tired; there are pictures on the Internet of visiting hunters standing beside meterhigh piles of bird carcasses.

The responsible hunters in Italy hate the wild ones; they hate Franco Orsi. "We have a culture clash in Italy between two visions of hunting," Massimo Canale, a young hunter in Reggio di Calabria, told me. "One side, Orsi's side, says, 'Let's just open it up.' On the other side are people with a sense of responsibility for where they live. To become a selective hunter, you need more than just a license. You need to study biology, physics, ballistics. You become selective for boar and deer—you have a role to play." Canale discovered his predatory instinct as a child, while hunting indiscriminately with his grandfather, and he feels fortunate to have met people who taught him a better way. "I don't mind not killing something on any given day," he said, "but killing is the goal, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. I have a conflict between my predatory instinct and my rationality, and my way of trying to tame my instinct is through selective hunting. In my opinion, it's the only way to hunt in 2010. And Orsi doesn't know or care about it."

The two visions of hunting correspond broadly to Italy's two faces. There's the frankly criminal Italy of the Camorra and its allies and the quasi-criminal Italy of Berlusconi's cronies, but there is also, still,
l'Italia che lavora
—"the Italy that works." The Italians who combat poaching are motivated by disgust with their country's lawlessness, and they rely heavily on tips from responsible hunters like Canale, who become frustrated when, for example, they're unable to find quail to shoot because all the birds have been attracted to illegal recordings. In Salerno, the least disorderly of Campania's provinces, I joined a squad of WWF guards who took me out to an artificial pond, now drained, where they had recently stalked the president of a regional hunters' association and caught him illegally using electronic recordings to attract birds. Looming near the pond, amid fields rendered desolate by white plastic crop covers, was a disintegrating mountain of "ecoballs"—shrink-wrapped bales of Neapolitan garbage that had been dumped all over the Campanian countryside and become a symbol of Italy's environmental crisis. "It was the second time in two years that we'd caught the guy," the squad leader said. "He was part of the committee that regulates hunting in the region, and he'd remained president in spite of having been charged. There are other regional presidents who do the same thing but are harder to catch."

One shining example of the Italy that works has been the suppression of honey-buzzard poaching at the Strait of Messina. Every year since 1985, the national forest police have assigned an extra team with helicopters to patrol the Calabrian side of the strait. Although the Calabrian situation has lately deteriorated somewhat—this year's team was smaller than in the past and stayed for fewer days, and the estimated death toll was four hundred, double the number in recent years—the Sicilian side of the strait is the domain of a famous crusader, Anna Giordano, and remains essentially free of poachers. Beginning as a fifteen-year-old in 1981, Giordano undertook surveillance of the concrete blinds from which raptors were being shot by the thousands as they sailed in low over the mountains above Messina. Unlike the Calabrians, who ate the buzzards, the Sicilians shot purely for the sake of tradition, for competition with one another, and for trophies. Some of them shot everything; others restricted themselves to honey buzzard ("The Bird," they called it) unless they saw a real rarity, like golden eagle. Giordano hurried from the blinds to the nearest pay phone, from which she summoned the forest police, and then back to the blinds. Although her cars were vandalized, and although she was constantly threatened and vilified, she was never physically harmed, probably because she was a young woman. (The Italtan word for "bird,"
uccello,
is also slang for "penis" and lent itself to dirty jibes about her, but a poster I saw on the wall of her office flipped these jibes around: "Your Virility? A Dead Bird.") With increasing success, especially after the advent of cell phones, Giordano compelled the forest police to crack down on the poachers, and her growing fame brought media attention and legions of volunteers. In recent years her teams have reported seasonal gunshot totals in the single digits.

"In the early years," Giordano said when I joined her on a hilltop to look at passing hawks, "we didn't even dare raise our binoculars when we were counting raptors, because the poachers would watch us and start shooting if they saw us looking at something. Our logs from back then show lots of 'unidentified raptors.' And now we can stand up here all afternoon, comparing the markings of first-calendar-year female harriers and not hear a shot. A couple of years ago, one of the worst poachers, a violent, stupid, vulgar guy who'd always been in our face wherever we went, drove up to me and asked if we could talk. I was, like, 'Heh-heh-heh-heh, okay.' He asked me if I remembered what I'd said to him twenty-five years ago. I said I couldn't remember what I said yesterday. He said, 'You said the day would come when I would love the birds instead of killing them. I just came up here to tell you you were right. I used to say to my son when we were going out, Have you got the gun? Now I say, Have you got the binoculars?' And I handed him my own binoculars—to a poacher!—so he could see a honey buzzard that was flying over."

Giordano is small, dark, and zealous. She has lately been attacking the local government for failing to regulate housing development around Messina, and, as if to insure that she has too much to do, she also helps operate a wildlife rescue center. I'd already visited one Italian animal hospital, on the grounds of a shuttered psychiatric hospital in Naples, and seen an X-ray of a hawk heavily dotted with lead shot, several recovering raptors in large cages, and a seagull whose left leg was blackened and shriveled from having stepped in acid. At Giordano's center, on a hill behind Messina, I watched her feed scraps of raw turkey to a small eagle that had been blinded by a shotgun pellet. She grasped the eagle's taloned legs in one hand and cradled the bird against her belly. Its tail feathers sadly bedraggled, its gaze stern but impotent, it suffered her to open its bill and stuff in meat until its gullet bulged. The bird seemed to me at once all eagle and no longer an eagle at all. I didn't know what it was.