The Secretariat of Animal Welfare has said that claims made yesterday by CABS and BirdLife Malta, are “grossly misleading.”

In a joint statement the NGOs had said that “over a third of trapping sites active during this autumn’s trapping derogation are not registered and illegal, while the remaining sites permitted by the Wild Birds Regulation Unit (WBRU) within Natura 2000 sites are in possible breach of habitat protection regulations.”

“The NGOs seemingly reached this conclusion on the basis of a list of coordinates of selected locations within several coastal areas which appeared to them as being active trapping sites, and which they reported to WBRU at the end of October and November respectively,” the Secretariat said.

“These conclusions are grossly misleading, since one cannot extrapolate a very small and unrepresentative sample of locations surveyed from the air and establish that over a third of all sites are illegal.”

Following checks performed by the Unit, the Secretariat said that the NGOs were informed that several site locations provided by them were indeed unregistered with the authorities, “and therefore any presumed trapping activity on such sites is outright illegal.”

This verification was immediately followed by physical inspections of each reported unregistered site, performed by the ALE, Gozo police and WBRU. Location of the sites was also referred to the Environment and Resources Authority (ERA) for necessary investigation, said the Secretariat.

“Physical inspection of the sites revealed that in the vast majority of cases, the locations reported by CABS and BLM contained old disused trapping sites which, although apparently appearing to the NGOs from the air as being active, in actual fact were found to have not been used for years,” it said.

The Secretariat added that “such sites may have been in use prior to 2014, when no site registration system was in place, a fact that the NGOs conveniently omit from their statement, but were no longer used after the WBRU introduced in July 2014 a rigorous site registration and screening system, whereby only those sites that meet the legal criteria were registered.”

“These legal criteria stipulate, among other requirements, that sites located within Natura 2000 and in other protected areas can be registered only if located on cultivated agricultural land that is officially registered as such with the Department for Agriculture.”

“Moreover, for sites to have been registered, it had to be proven that the sites had existed prior to the end of December 2012,” added the Secretariat. “The authorities estimate that as a result of implementing this site registration system, over a third of the total number of trapping sites that were previously active, are no longer used.”

The Secretariat pointed out that other coordinates reported by the NGOs contained errors, leading the inspectors to “sites” that in actual fact turned out to be locations such as the middle of the road, inside an Enemalta facility, a disused room, or a natural clearing in garrigue.

“Only a handful of sites reported were actually found to have signs of recent use. Such sites were placed under subsequent surveillance, to identify perpetrators. By early December, in only three cases the sites reported by BLM / CABS were actually found to be active during the time of inspection, and the suspects were caught in flagrant leading to appropriate legal action.”

The Secretariat said that thousands of other routine inspections and spot checks were conducted so far during the season by over 70 officers deployed in the countryside. These inspections have led to the disclosure of several trapping offences, including illegal use of bird callers, exceedance in the number of live decoys and other irregularities.

“Appropriate legal action is being taken against these breaches. As was the case also in previous years, detailed enforcement statistics will be published in a report following closure of the season.”

The Secretariat stated that the WBRU is fully equipped in terms of the required technical capacity and human resources to carry out enforcement. “The work of the Wild Birds Regulation Unit, which issues various hunting licenses and enforces compliance with license conditions is no different to the work of other authorities both in Malta and overseas.”

The Secretariat concluded by saying that “by persisting in these allegations, both NGOs continue to display lack of cooperation with government entities, which is highly regrettable and unproductive, given that much greater results for conservation could have been achieved through cooperation.”

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