by Mary Roach
Maltese hunters are in the weak position of wanting something that would get Malta into real, punishable trouble with the EU: the legal right to shoot birds bound for their breeding grounds. Their leaders at the FKNK thus have little choice but to adopt uncompromising positions, such as this spring's boycott, which raises false hopes in the FKNK rank and file, fostering frustration and feelings of betrayal when, inevitably, the government disappoints them. I met with the FKNK's spokesman, Joseph Perici Calascione, a nervous but articulate man, at the organization's cramped, cluttered headquarters. "How could anybody, in their wildest imagination, expect us to be satisfied with a spring season that left eighty percent of hunters unable to get a license?" Perici Calascione said. "We've already gone two years without a season that was part of our tradition, part of our living. We weren't looking for a season as it was three years ago, but still a reasonable season, which the government had promised us in no uncertain terms before accession to the EU."
I brought up the matter of illegal shooting, and Perici Calascione offered me a Scotch. When I declined, he poured himself one. "We're completely against the illegal shooting of protected species," he said. "We're prepared to have hunting marshals in place to spot these individuals and take away their membership. And this would have been in place, had we been given a good season." Perici Calascione conceded that he was uncomfortable with the more incendiary statements of the FKNK's general secretary, but he himself became visibly distressed as he tried to convey how much hunting mattered to him; he sounded strangely like a victimized environmentalist. "Everybody is frustrated," he said, with a tremor in his voice. "Psychiatric incidents have increased, we've had suicides among our membership—our culture is threatened."
Just how much Maltese-style shooting is a "culture" and a "tradition" is debatable. While spring hunting and the killing and taxidermy of rare birds are unquestionably traditions of long standing, the phenomenon of indiscriminate slaughter seems not to have arisen until the 1960s, when Malta achieved its independence and began to prosper. Malta, indeed, represents a stark refutation of the theory that a society's affluence leads to better environmental stewardship. Affluence in Malta brought more sophisticated weapons, more money to pay taxidermists, and more cars and better roads, which made the countryside more easily accessible to hunters. Where hunting had once been a tradition handed down from father to son, it now became the pastime of young men who went out in unruly groups.
On a piece of land belonging to a hotel that hopes to build a golf course on it, I met with an old-fashioned hunter who is disgusted with his countrymen's bad behavior and with the FKNK's tolerance of it. He told me that undisciplined shooting is in the Maltese "blood" and that it was unreasonable to expect hunters to suddenly change after the country joined the EU. ("If you were born of a prostitute," he said, "you won't become a nun.") But he also put much of the blame on younger hunters and said that Malta's lowering of the hunting age from twenty-one to eighteen had made matters worse. "And now that they've changed the spring-hunting law," he said, "law-abiding people can't go out, but the indiscriminate shooters still go out, because there's not enough law enforcement. I've been in the country for three weeks this spring, and I've seen one police car."
Spring was always the main hunting season in Malta, and the hunter said that if the season is closed permanently he will probably keep hunting in the fall only as long as his two dogs live, and then quit and be just a bird watcher. "Something else is happening," he said. "Because where are the turtledoves? When I was young and going out with my father, we'd look up at the sky and see thousands of them. Now it's peak season, and I was out all day yesterday and saw twelve. I haven't seen a nightjar in two years. I haven't seen a rock thrush in five years. Last autumn, I went out every morning and afternoon looking for woodcock, with my dogs, and I saw three of them and didn't fire once. And that's part of the problem: people get frustrated. 'I don't find a woodcock, so let's shoot a kestrel.'"
Late on a Sunday afternoon, from a secluded height, Temuge and I used a telescope to spy on two men who were scanning the sky and fields with binoculars. "They're definitely hunters," Temuge said. "They keep their guns hidden until something comes by for them to shoot." But, as an hour passed and nothing came by, the men picked up rakes and began weeding a garden, only occasionally returning to their binoculars, and then another hour passed and they worked harder in the garden, because there were no birds.
Italy is a long, narrow gauntlet for a winged migrant to run. Poachers in Brescia, in the north, trap a million songbirds annually for sale to restaurants offering pulenta e osei—polenta with little birds. The woods of Sardinia are full of wire snares, the Venetian wetlands are a slaughtering ground for wintering ducks, and Umbria, the home of Saint Francis, has more registered hunters per capita than any other region. Hunters in Tuscany pursue their quotas of woodcock and wood pigeon and four legally shootable songbirds, including song thrush and skylark; but at dawn, in the mist, it's hard to distinguish legal from illegal quarry, and who's keeping track anyway? To the south, in Campania, much of which is controlled by the Camorra (the local mafia), the most inviting habitat for migratory waterfowl and waders is in fields flooded by the Camorra and rented to hunters for up to a thousand euros a day; songbird wholesalers from Brescia bring down refrigerated trucks to collect the take from small-time poachers; entire Campanian provinces are blanketed with traps for seven tuneful European finch species, and flush Camorristi pay handsomely for well-trained singers at the illegal bird markets there. Farther south, in Calabria and Sicily, the highly publicized springtime hunting of migrating honey buzzards has been reduced by intensive law enforcement and volunteer monitoring, but Calabria, especially, is still full of poachers who, if they can get away with it, will shoot anything that flies.
A curious old statute in Italy's civil code, enacted by the Fascists to encourage familiarity with firearms, gives hunters, and only hunters, the right to enter private property, regardless of who owns it, in pursuit of game. By the 1980s, there were more than two million licensed hunters running wild in the Italian countryside, which had emptied out as the population flowed into the cities. Most urban Italians dislike hunting, however, and in 1992 the Italian parliament passed one of Europe's more restrictive hunting laws, which included, most radically, a declaration that all wild fauna belong exclusively to the Italian state, thereby reducing hunting to a special concession. In the two decades since then, the populations of some of Italy's most lovable megafauna, including wolves, have rebounded spectacularly, while the number of licensed hunters has fallen below eight hundred thousand. These two trends have prompted Franco Orsi, a Ligurian senator from Silvio Berlusconi's party, to propose a law that would liberalize the use of decoy birds and expand the times and places in which hunting is permitted. A second, "communitary" law, intended to bring Italy into compliance with the Birds Directive and thereby avoid hundreds of millions of euros in fines pending against it, has just been passed by the parliament and includes at least one clear victory for hunters: a shifting of the hunting season for certain bird species into February.
I met with Orsi at his party's offices in Genoa, on the eve of regional elections that brought fresh gains for Berlusconi's coalition. Orsi, a handsome, soft-eyed man in his forties, is a passionate hunter who chooses vacation destinations on the basis of what he can shoot in them. His argument for updating the 1992 law is that it has led to an explosive increase of harmful species; that Italian hunters should be allowed to do whatever French and Spanish hunters do; that private landowners could manage land for game better than the state does; and that hunting is a socially and spiritually beneficial activity. He showed me a newspaper picture of wild boar running down a Genoese street; he described the menace posed by starlings at airports and in vineyards. But when I agreed that controlling boar and starlings is a good idea, he went on to say that hunters don't like killing boar in the season the authorities want them to. "And, anyway, I can't accept that hunti
ng is only for wild boar, nutria, and starlings," he said. "That's something the army can do."
I asked Orsi if he favored hunting every bird species to the maximum compatible with sustaining existing numbers.
"Let's imagine fauna as capital that every year produces interest," he said. "If I spend the interest, I can still keep the capital, and the future of the species and of hunting will be preserved."
"But there's also the investment strategy of reinvesting part of the interest, to grow the capital," I said.
"That depends on each species. There's an optimal density for each one, and some have a density that's larger than optimal, others smaller. So hunting has to regulate the balance."
My impression, from earlier visits to Italy, was that its avian populations are pretty much all suboptimal. Since Orsi didn't seem to share it, I asked him how he thought hunting harmless birds benefited society. To my surprise, he quoted Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation, to the effect that if every man had to kill the animals he eats, we would all be vegetarians. "In our urban society, we've lost the relationship between man and animal which has elements of violence," Orsi said. "When I was fourteen, my grandfather made me kill a chicken, which was the family tradition, and now every time I eat chicken I remember that it was an animal. To go back to Peter Singer, the overconsumption of animals in our society corresponds to an overconsumption of resources. Huge amounts of space are devoted to wasteful, industrialized farming, because we've lost a sense of rural identity. We shouldn't think that hunting is the only form of human violence against the environment. And hunting, in this sense, is educational."
I thought Orsi had a point, but to the Italian environmentalists I spoke with, his rhetoric proved only that he was skilled at handling journalists. Behind the national push to liberalize hunting laws, the ambientalisti all see the hand of Italy's large arms and munitions industry. As one of them said to me, "When somebody asks you what your business produces, do you say, 'Land mines that blow up Bosnian children,' or do you say, 'Traditional shotguns for people who enjoy waiting at dawn in a wetland for the ducks to come'?"
It's impossible to know how many birds are shot in Italy. The annual reported take of song thrushes, for example, ranges from three million to seven million, but Fernando Spina, a senior scientist at Italy's environmental-protection agency, considers these numbers "hugely conservative," since only the most conscientious hunters fill out their game cards correctly, local game authorities lack the manpower to police the hunters, the provincial databases are largely uncomputerized, and most local Italian hunting authorities routinely ignore requests for data. What is known is that Italy is a crucial migratory flyway. Banded birds have been recovered there from every country in Europe, thirty-eight countries in Africa, and six in Asia. And return migration begins in Italy very early, in some cases as early as late December. The EU's Birds Directive protects all birds on return migration, permitting hunting only within the limits of natural autumn mortality, and most responsible hunters therefore believe that the season should end on December 31. Italy's new communitary law goes the other way, however, and extends the season into February. Since early-return migrants tend to be the fittest of their species, the new law makes targets of precisely those birds with the best chance of breeding success. A longer season also protects poachers of protected species, because an illegal gunshot sounds just like a legal one. And without good data, nobody can say whether a region's annual bag limit on a species falls within natural mortality. "The bag limit is an arbitrary number, set by local officials," Spina said. "It has no relation to actual census numbers."
Although habitat loss is the biggest reason that European bird populations are collapsing, Italian-style hunting (caccia selvaggia, "wild hunting," its detractors call it) adds particular insult to the injury. When I asked Fulco Pratesi, a former big-game hunter who founded WWF Italy and who now considers hunting "a mania," why Italian hunters are so wild to kill birds, he cited his countrymen's love of weapons, their attachment to an "attitude of virility," their delight in breaking laws, and, strangely, their love of being in nature. "It's like a rapist who loves women but expresses it in a violent and perverse way," Pratesi said. "Birds that weigh twenty-two grams are being shot with thirty-two-gram ammunition." Italians, he added, more easily feel affection for "symbolic" animals like wolves and bears and have actually done a better job of protecting them than the rest of Europe has. "But birds are invisible," he said. "We don't see them, we don't hear them. In northern Europe, the arrival of migrating birds is visible and audible, and it moves people. Here, people live in cities and large housing complexes, and birds are literally up in the air."
For most of its history, Italy was visited every spring and fall by unimaginable numbers of packets of flying protein, and, unlike northern Europe, where people learned to see the correlation between overharvesting and diminishing returns, supplies seemed limitless in the Mediterranean. A poacher from Reggio di Calabria, still bitter about being forbidden to shoot honey buzzards, said to me, "We were only killing about twenty-five hundred a spring in Reggio, out of a total passage of sixty to a hundred thousand—it wasn't a big deal." The only way he could understand the banning of his sport was in terms of money. He told me, in all seriousness, that certain organizations that wanted to tap into state money had set themselves up as antipoachers, and that it was their need for poachers to oppose which had led to the writing of antipoaching laws. "And now these people are getting rich with money from the state," he explained.
In one of the southern provinces, I got to know an impishly boyish ex-poacher named Sergio. He'd been well into middle age before giving up poaching, feeling that he'd finally outgrown that stage of life, and he now tells stories of his "sins of youth" for comic effect. Going hunting at night was always illegal but never a problem, Sergio said, if your poaching companions were the parish priest and the brigadier of the local carabiniere. The brigadier was especially helpful in discouraging forest rangers from patrolling in their neighborhood. One night when Sergio was out hunting with him, they froze a barn owl in the headlights of the brigadier's Jeep. The brigadier told Sergio to shoot it. When Sergio demurred, the brigadier took out a shovel, walked around behind the owl, and whacked it on the head. Then he put it in the rear compartment of the Jeep.
"Why?" I asked Sergio. "Why did he want to kill the owl?"
"Because we were poaching!"
At the end of the night, when the brigadier opened the rear compartment, the owl, which had only been stunned, flew up and attacked him—Sergio spread his arms and made a ridiculously ferocious face to show me how.
For Sergio, the point of poaching had always been eating. He taught me a rhyme in his local dialect, which approximately translates: For meat of the feather, eat a crow; for a heart that's kind, love a crone. "You can cook crow for six days, and it's still tough," he told me. "But it's not bad in a broth. I also ate badger and fox—I ate everything." The only bird that no Italian seems interested in eating is the seagull. Even the honey buzzard, although southern families traditionally kept one specimen stuffed and mounted in the best room of their house (its local nickname is adorno, for "adornment"), was eaten as a springtime treat; the poacher in Reggio gave me his recipe for fricasseeing it with sugar and vinegar.
Italian wild hunters who, unlike Sergio, haven't outgrown the pursuit and who are frustrated by declining game populations and increasing state restrictions, have learned to go elsewhere in the Mediterranean for a thrill. On the Campanian seacoast, I spoke with a gap-toothed, gleefully unrepentant young-old poacher who, now that he can no longer set up a blind on the beach and shoot unlimited numbers of arriving migrants, contents himself with looking forward to vacations in Albania, where you can still shoot as much as you can find of whatever you want, whenever you want, for a very low fee. Although hunters from all nations go abroad, the Italians are widely considered to be the worst. The wealthiest of them go to Siberia to shoot woodcock during their springt
ime display flights or to Egypt, where, I was told, you can hire a local police officer to fetch your kills while you shoot ibises and globally threatened duck species until your arms are tired; there are pictures on the Internet of visiting hunters standing beside meterhigh piles of bird carcasses.
The responsible hunters in Italy hate the wild ones; they hate Franco Orsi. "We have a culture clash in Italy between two visions of hunting," Massimo Canale, a young hunter in Reggio di Calabria, told me. "One side, Orsi's side, says, 'Let's just open it up.' On the other side are people with a sense of responsibility for where they live. To become a selective hunter, you need more than just a license. You need to study biology, physics, ballistics. You become selective for boar and deer—you have a role to play." Canale discovered his predatory instinct as a child, while hunting indiscriminately with his grandfather, and he feels fortunate to have met people who taught him a better way. "I don't mind not killing something on any given day," he said, "but killing is the goal, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. I have a conflict between my predatory instinct and my rationality, and my way of trying to tame my instinct is through selective hunting. In my opinion, it's the only way to hunt in 2010. And Orsi doesn't know or care about it."