Puzzled by the lack of birds in Malta

I’VE just come back from my first visit to Malta. I found it to be a fascinating and charming country but I was puzzled by the lack of birds. 

I spent a week there, much of it walking in open countryside or along the shore, and I saw plenty of butterflies and some lizards but the only birds in the entire week were some feral pigeons and a few sparrows.

The sparrows were interesting because they were subtly different to Irish house sparrows — slimmer and less boldly marked. When I got back I consulted reference books and the internet but discovered that the experts don’t agree on the classification of Maltese sparrows.

They might be a race of the house sparrow, they might be Spanish sparrows, they could be hybrids or even something called the Italian sparrow, which some authorities claim is a species, some claim is a sub-species and others say doesn’t exist at all. The fact that they were already in winter plumage meant that nothing short of a DNA test could settle the question.

As for the absence of any species of crow or any seagulls, it appears they have all been shot. Malta has the highest density of hunters in Europe and they have an extraordinary attitude to what constitutes fair game.

Everything is shot. The only reason sparrows and feral pigeons escape is that they live in densely populated urban areas where the hunters can’t use their guns. Apparently the hunters have a saying: “if it flies, it dies”.

Most of the shot birds are inedible. Some of the more exotic end up in the hands of taxidermists but most are dumped. If they have been illegally shot they’re often concealed in shallow mass graves. Malta is a member of the EU and all this is, of course, in contravention of several EU directives. In 2009 it was convicted in the European Court of Justice. However, it’s also one of the most frequently colonised countries in the world which only achieved its full independence as a republic in 1974. Thus, the Maltese people are proudly defiant when it comes to outsiders telling them what to do.

The government has bowed to international pressure and introduced laws controlling hunting but the hunters seem to ignore their own government as well as the EU.

Last year conservation groups organised a petition to ban the spring hunting season and got enough signatures to legally compel the government to hold a referendum. There was a high turnout and the hunting lobby won by a narrow margin. The significance of the spring hunting season is that Maltese hunters, having wiped out all their indigenous birds, have to rely on the fact that the islands are a stopping off place for spring and autumn migrants crossing the Mediterranean. This means their actions have a direct impact on Irish bird populations.