Observations on Maltese wildlife

Nick and Maisy from London blog together at 20six. They visited Malta a few weeks ago and in this review Nick blogs about the odd buses, the UK high street stores in Sliema and the rip offs at the airport duty free. In her Malta review, Maisy writes about timeshare salesmen and her difficulties in finding Maltese food at the restaurants. She says that Maltese people are obsessed by door knockers and balconies. In this other post, Nick comments on the 'Maltese wildlife':

Malta has only three major animal types: the Cicada, stray cats and horses. The first are EVERYWHERE and make a god-awful racket all day long. I never realised a couple of fat moths could make so much noise without apparently moving. Give me the friendly chirrup of a grasshopper any day. The pests manage to get away with their behaviour because of observation part 2: there are (almost) no birds at all on the island.

Other than a few foul pigeons in the capital and the occasional sparrow, Malta is barren of aviaral life - even in the so-called bird sanctuary. This was very odd to experience, especially the lack of seabirds given the bountiful supply of fish. Apparently any birds are regularly hunted down by the locals, which kind of explains some of the food being served up in the local cafes.

This has, in turn, lead to the local cat population surviving almost exclusively on the generosity of hotel guests, though survive (& survive well) they do. Most seemed to be cute gingey ones, which obviously has come about as a result of natural selection and the hotel patrons preference of marmelade cats to black ones.

The only livestock anywhere on the island were the drawn looking horses drawing horse drawn carriages. Poor things looked to be kept in shoddy conditions in most cases. Whilst we sometimes smelt manure, we never once saw any cows, sheep or goats - odd, considering one of the local delicacies is goats cheese.

Cat enthusiast Helen writes about stray cats in Malta