The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

by Mary Roach

  The worst area in Cyprus for poaching is the British military base on Cape Pyla. The British may be the bird-lovingest people in Europe, but the base, which leases its extensive firing ranges to Cypriot farmers, is in a delicate position diplomatically; after one recent enforcement sweep by the army, twenty-two Sovereign Base Area signs were torn down by angry locals. Off the base, enforcement is hampered by logistics and politics. Poachers employ lookouts and night guards and have learned to erect little shacks on their sites, because Game Fund officers are required to get a warrant to search any "domicile," and in the time it takes to do this the poachers can take down their nets and hide their electronic equipment. Because large-scale poachers are nowadays straight-up criminals, the officers are also afraid of violent attacks. "The biggest problem is that no one in Cyprus, not even the politicians, comes out and says that eating ambelopoulia is wrong," the director of the Game Fund, Pantelis Hadjigerou, told me. Indeed, the record holder for most ambelopoulia eaten in one sitting (fifty-four) was a popular politician in north Cyprus.

  "Our ideal would be to find a well-known personality to come out and say, 'I don't eat ambelopoulia, it's wrong,'" the director of BirdLife Cyprus, Clairie Papazoglou, said to me. "But there's a little pact here that says that if anything bad happens it has to stay on the island, we can't look bad to the outside world."

  "Before Cyprus joined the EU," Hellicar said, "the trappers said, We'll pull back for a while. Now, for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, there's a kind of patriotic machismo to poaching. It's a symbol of resistance to Big Brother EU."

  What seemed Orwellian to me was Cyprus's internal politics. It's been thirty-six years since Turkey occupied the northern part of the island, and the ethnically Greek south has prospered immensely since then, but the national news is still dominated, seven days a week, by the Cyprus Problem. "Every other issue is swept under the carpet, everything else is insignificant," the Cypriot social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis told me. "They say, 'How dare you take us to European Court for something as stupid as birds? We're taking Turkey to court!' There was never any serious debate about joining the EU—it was simply the means by which we were going to solve the Cyprus Problem."

  The European Union's most powerful instrument of conservation is its landmark Birds Directive, which was issued in 1979 and requires member states to protect all European bird species and preserve sufficient habitat for them. Since joining the EU in 2004, Cyprus has received repeated warnings from the European Commission for infringement of the directive, but it has so far avoided judgments and fines; if a member state's environmental laws accord on paper with the directive, the commission is reluctant to interfere with sovereign enforcement.

  Cyprus's nominally Communist ruling party ardently embraces private development. The tourism ministry is touting plans to build fourteen new residential golf complexes (the island currently has three), even though the country has very limited supplies of fresh water. Anyone who owns land reachable by road can build on it, and, as a result, the countryside is remarkably fragmented. I visited four of the southeast's most important nature preserves, all of them theoretically due special protection under EU regulations, and was uniformly depressed by their condition. The big seasonal lake at Paralimni, for example, near where I was patrolling with the CABS people, is a noisy dust bowl commandeered for an illegal shooting range and an illegal motocross course, carpeted with shotgun shells, and extensively littered with construction debris, discarded large appliances, and household trash.

  And yet birds still come to Cyprus; they have no choice. Returning to town at some less white-skied hour, the CABS patrol stopped to admire a black-headed bunting, a jewel of gold and black and chestnut, that was singing from the top of a bush. For a moment our tension abated, and we were all just bird watchers exclaiming in our native languages.

  "Ah, che bello!"

  "Fantastic!"

  "Unglaublich schön!"

  Before we quit for the day, Rutigliano wanted to make one last stop, at an orchard where the previous year a CABS volunteer had been roughed up by trappers. As we were turning, in the team's rental car, off the main highway and up a dirt track, a red four-seater pickup truck was coming down the track, and its driver made a neck-slicing gesture at us. After the truck had moved onto the highway, two of its passengers leaned out of windows to give us the finger.

  Heyd, the sober German, wanted to turn around and leave immediately, but the others argued that there was no reason to think the men were coming back. We proceeded up to the orchard and found it hung with four collared flycatchers and one wood warbler, which, because it couldn't get airborne, Rutigliano gave to me to put in my backpack. When all the lime sticks had been destroyed, Heyd again, more nervously, suggested that we leave. But there was another grove in the distance which the two Italians wanted to investigate. "I don't have a bad feeling," Rutigliano said.

  "There's an English expression, 'Don't press your luck,'" Conlin said.

  At that moment the red pickup sped back into sight, fifty yards down the slope from us, and stopped with a lurch. Three men jumped out and began running toward us, picking up baseball-size rocks and hurling them at us as they ran. I would have guessed that it was easy to dodge a few flying rocks, but it wasn't so easy, and Conlin and Heyd were hit by them. Rutigliano was shooting video, Mensi was taking pictures, and there was a lot of confused shouting—"Keep shooting, keep shooting!" "Call the police!" "What the hell is the number?" Mindful of the warbler in my backpack, and not eager to be mistaken for a CABS member, I followed Heyd as he retreated up the slope. From a not very safe distance, we stopped and watched two men attacking Mensi, trying to pull his backpack from his shoulders and his camera from his hands. The men, who were in their thirties and deeply suntanned, were shouting, "Why do you do this? Why do you make photos?" Mensi, keening terribly, his muscles bulging, was clutching the camera to his stomach. The men picked him up, threw him down, and fell on him; there ensued a blur of fighting. I couldn't see Rutigliano but later learned that he was being hit in the face, knocked to the ground, and kicked in the legs and the ribs. His video camera was smashed on a rock; Mensi was also hit in the head with it. Conlin was standing amid the fray with formidable military bearing, holding two cell phones and trying to dial the police. He said to me later that he'd told the attackers that he would drag them through every court in the country if they touched him.

  Heyd had continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked, too.

  Running from danger is like no other kind of running—it's hard to look where you're going. I jumped a stone fence and dashed through a field full of brambles, found myself stumbling into a ditch and getting hit in the chin by a piece of metal fencing, and decided: That's enough of that. I was worried about the warbler I was carrying. I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden's owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I'd blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. "Barbarians!" the daughter translated.

  Back down by the rental car, under clouds threatening rain, Mensi was touching his ribs gently and dabbing at the cuts and abrasions that covered his arms; both his camera and his backpack had been stolen. Conlin showed me the smashed video camera, and Rutigliano, who had lost his glasses and was limping heavily, confessed to me, with matter-of-fact fanaticism, "I wanted something like this to happen. Just not this bad."

  A second CABS team had arrived and was milling around with grim expressions. In its car was an empty wine carton into which, as a police cruiser was pulling up, I was able to transfer the wood warbler, which was looking subdued but no worse for t
he wear. I would have felt better about its rescue had there not been, on my cell phone, a new text message from a Cypriot friend of mine, confirming our clandestine date to eat ambelopoulia the following night. I was managing to half-convince myself that I could simply be a good journalistic observer and not personally have to eat one, but it wasn't at all clear how I could avoid it.

  Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean. As its waters are fished clean by trawlers with sonar and efficient nets, its skies are vacuumed clean of migrants by the extremely effective technology of birdsong recordings. Since the 1970s, as a result of the Birds Directive and various other conservation treaties, the situation of some of the most endangered bird species has improved somewhat. But hunters throughout the Mediterranean are now seizing on this marginal improvement and pushing back. Cyprus recently experimented with a spring season on quail and turtledove; Malta, in April, opened its own spring season; and Italy's parliament, in May, passed a law that extends the fall season there. While Europeans may think of themselves as models of environmental enlightenment—they certainly lecture the United States and China on carbon emissions as if they were—the populations of many resident and migratory birds in Europe have been collapsing alarmingly in the past ten years. You don't have to be a bird watcher to miss the calling of the cuckoo, the circling of lapwings over fields, the singing of corn buntings from utility poles. A world of birds already battered by habitat loss and intensive agriculture is being hastened toward extinction by hunters and trappers. Spring in the Old World is liable to fall silent far sooner than in the New.

  The Republic of Malta, which consists of several densely populated chunks of limestone with collectively less than twice the area of the District of Columbia, is the most savagely bird-hostile place in Europe. There are twelve thousand registered hunters (about 3 percent of the country's population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird's protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the sides of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; nonrarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, so as not to incriminate their shooters. When bird watchers in Italy see a migrant that's missing a chunk of its wing or its tail, they call it "Maltese plumage."

  In the 1990s, in the runup to Malta's accession to the EU, the government began to enforce an existing law against shooting nongame species, and Malta became a cause célèbre among groups as far-flung as the U.K.'s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which sent volunteers to assist with law enforcement. As a result, in the words of a British volunteer I spoke to, "the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious." But Maltese hunters, who argue that the country is too small for its shooting to make a meaningful dent in European bird populations, fiercely resent what they see as foreign interference in their "tradition." The national hunters' organization, the Federazzjoni Kaċċaturi Nassaba Konservazzjonisti, said in its April 2008 newsletter, "FKNK believes that the police's work should only be done by Maltese police and not by arrogant foreign extremists who think Malta is theirs because it's in the EU."

  When, in 2006, the local bird group BirdLife Malta hired a Turkish national, Tolga Temuge, a former Greenpeace campaigns director, to launch an aggressive campaign against illegal hunting, hunters were reminded of Malta's siege by the Turks in 1565 and reacted with explosive rage. The FKNK's general secretary, Lino Farugia, inveighed against "the Turk" and his "Maltese lackeys," and there ensued a string of threats and attacks on BirdLife's property and personnel. A BirdLife member was shot in the face; three cars belonging to BirdLife volunteers were set on fire; and several thousand young trees were uprooted at a reforestation site that hunters resent for its competition with the main island's only other forest, which they control and shoot roosting birds in. As a widely read hunters' magazine explained in August 2008, "There is a limit to what extent one can expect to stretch the strong moral ties and values of Maltese families and stop their Latin blood from boiling over and expect them to give up their land and culture in a cowardly retreat."

  And yet, in contrast to Cyprus, Maltese public opinion is strongly antihunting. Along with banking, tourism is Malta's main industry, and the newspapers frequently print angry letters from tourists who have been menaced by hunters or have witnessed avian atrocities. The Maltese middle class itself is unhappy that the country's very limited open space is overrun by trigger-happy hunters who post NO TRESPASSING signs on public land. Unlike BirdLife Cyprus, BirdLife Malta has succeeded in enlisting prominent citizens, including the owner of the Radisson Hotel group, in a media campaign called "Reclaiming YOUR Countryside."

  Malta is a two-party country, however, and because its national elections are typically decided by a few thousand votes, neither the Labor Party nor the Nationalists can afford to alienate their hunting constituents so much that they stay away from the polls. Enforcement of hunting laws therefore continues to be lax: minimal manpower is devoted to it, many local police are friendly with hunters, and even the good police can be lethargic in responding to complaints. Even when offenders are prosecuted, Maltese courts have been reluctant to fine them more than a few hundred euros.

  This year the Nationalist government opened the country's spring season on quail and turtledove in defiance of a European Court of Justice ruling last fall. The EU Birds Directive permits member states to apply "derogations" and allow the killing of small numbers of protected species for "judicious use," such as control of bird flocks around airports or subsistence hunting by traditional rural communities. The Maltese government had sought a derogation for continuing the "tradition" of spring hunting, which the directive normally forbids, and the Court had ruled that Malta's proposal failed three of four tests provided by the directive: strict enforcement, small numbers, and parity with other EU member states. Regarding the fourth test, however—whether an "alternative" exists—Malta presented evidence, in the form of bag counts, that autumn hunting of quail and turtledove was not a satisfactory alternative to spring hunting. Although the government was aware that the bag counts were unreliable (the FKNK's general secretary himself once publicly admitted that the actual bag might be ten times higher than the reported count), the European Commission has a policy of trusting the data presented by the governments of member states. Malta further argued that because quail and turtledove aren't globally threatened species (they're still plentiful in Asia), they didn't merit absolute protection, and the commission's lawyers failed to point out that what counted was the species' status within the EU, where, in fact, their populations are in serious decline. The Court, therefore, while ruling against Malta and forbidding a spring hunt, did allow that it had passed one of the four tests. And the government at home proclaimed a "victory" and proceeded, in early April, to authorize a hunt.

  I joined Tolga Temuge, who looks like a Turkish David Foster Wallace, on an early-morning patrol on the first day of the season. We weren't expecting to see much shooting, because the FKNK, angered by the government's terms—the season would last only six half-days, instead of the traditional six to eight weeks, and only 2,500 licenses would be granted—had organized a boycott of the season, threatening to "name and shame" any hunter who applied for a license. "The European Commission failed," Temuge said as we drove the dark, dusty labyrinth of Malta's road system. "The European hunting organization and BirdLife International di
d a lot of hard work to arrive at sustainable hunting limits, and then Malta joins the EU, as the smallest member state, and threatens to bring down the whole edifice of the excellent Birds Directive. Malta's disregard for it is setting a bad precedent for other member states, especially in the Mediterranean, to behave the same way."

  When the sky lightened, we stopped in a rough limestone lane, amid walled fields of golden hay, and listened for gunshots. I heard dogs barking, a cock crowing, trucks shifting gears, and, somewhere nearby, electronic quail song playing. Patrolling elsewhere on the island were six other of Temuge's teams, staffed mainly by foreign volunteers, with a few hired Maltese security men. As the sun came up, we began to hear distant gunshots, but not many; the country seemed essentially bird-free that morning. We proceeded through a village in which a couple of shots rang out—"Fucking unbelievable!" Temuge cried. "This is a residential area! Fucking unbelievable!"—and back into the stony maze of walls that passes for countryside in Malta. Further gunshots led us to a small field in which two men in their thirties were standing with a handheld radio. As soon as they saw us, they picked up hoes and began tending lush plantings of beans and onions. "Once you're in the area, they know," Temuge said. "Everybody knows. If they have radios, it's ninety percent sure they're hunters." It did indeed seem awfully early to be out doing hoe-work, and as long as we were standing by the field we heard no more shots. Four blazing male golden orioles flashed by, unlucky to have chosen Malta as a migratory stopover but lucky that we were standing there. In a low tree I spotted a female chaffinch, which is one of the most common birds in Europe and is all but absent in Malta, owing to the country's widespread illegal finch trapping. Temuge became very excited when I called it out. "A chaffinch!" he said. "That would be incredible, if we're starting to have breeding chaffinch here again." It was like somebody in North America being amazed to see a robin.