The Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) said today that hunters have installed hundreds of illegal electronic bird lures to disrupt nocturnal Quail migration over the Mediterranean.

A total of 93 bird callers for quails in the Northern and Western district were located by activists of the eNGO during night patrols. This corresponds to a 2-fold increase compared with the numbers found in the same areas last spring, said CABS.

CABS said that static bird caller installation include a loudspeaker, a car battery for power supply, an mp3 which imitates the courtship songs of the Quail and a timer which activates the fake bird calls in the night.

The Mgarr valley was the hotspot with a total of 25 devices calling throughout the night. The eNGO added that most of the installations were found at the western coast and in rural areas.

“The devices produce extremely loud signals which can be heard over a distance of several kilometres and which also attract birds down to the ground, when normally they would only fly by or over Malta.”

CABS pointed out that the use of pre-recorded bird calls for hunting is banned all over Europe, as it is regarded as a method for the mass-killing of birds which gather around the devices at night and are shot or trapped the next morning.

CABS General Secretary Alexander Heyd said that “the problem is well known to the authorities for many years but still the police and the government have done nothing to clamp down on the rampant use of these machines, especially at night.”

He went on to say that “to make the situation even worse WBRU and Parliamentary Secretary Roderick Galdes repeatedly stated that the use of bird callers has decreased while in fact the opposite is the case.”

The statement he referred to was from the Parliamentary Secretariat for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights “that the illegal use of bird callers declined by 60% compared to pre-2013 levels, issued on the 19th December 2016.” CABS said that the Secretariat asserted that the number of convictions for this type of offence has dropped accordingly.

Heyd stated, “the decrease in convictions celebrated by Roderick Galdes and the simultaneous rise in cases observed by our teams proves that enforcement is in fact at an all-time low.”

According to CABS “the reasons are obvious: No police night patrols and decriminalisation of this type of offence. This is exactly the opposite of strict enforcement which is one of the conditions if a country is derogating from the Birds Directive as Malta did with spring hunting.” the eNGO said.

CABS announced that it will report its findings to the European Commission which is responsible for the implementation of the BD in the member states of the EU.

CABS Wildlife Crime Officer Fiona Burrows stated, “despite claims of night patrols for ALE announced by the Police Commissioner, we have discovered that in fact there is still no ALE night shift to deal with illegal callers and illegal trapping at night. As a result, these crimes are spiralling out of control.”

File photo by CABS of a static bird caller for Quail

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