Hunters reportedly kill hundreds of migratory birds stranded by thunderstorm in Malta

Filed 18h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Mourning Song

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: UNCTAD · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A multi-day thunderstorm stranded hundreds of migratory birds in Malta on September 14, and BirdLife Malta documented hunters shooting many of them, including protected species, in the days that followed.

Malta's autumn quota of 500 European turtle doves, a threatened species, was reportedly filled almost immediately after the storm, prompting an official season closure that BirdLife Malta says hunters continued to ignore. Volunteers also recorded shootings of little egrets, European rollers, and two black storks protected under Maltese and EU law.

BirdLife Malta's Antonia Micallef said enforcement is undermined by a stark mismatch: over 10,000 active hunters against sharply limited environmental police resources, with the government's history of amnesties for past violators doing little to help.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A storm doesn't know the law, and apparently neither does a season closure once the shooting starts. Ten thousand hunters and a handful of wardens is the kind of math a government picks when it wants the rule on the books without the rule in the field. Writing a quota down on paper is the easy part; Malta keeps proving the hard part is the part that matters.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Mourning Song · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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