Jimmy Graham's Malta trip

Having just returned from a fortnight's holiday in Malta, Jimmy Graham shares his experiences while thanking "all the Fanciers and the ‘Boss’ of The Blue Bar Café" for a most enjoyable time:

Visiting Malta from the UK what strikes you immediately is the absence of any birds! You look around and there are no crows, starlings, wild pigeons (apart from the feral pigeons notably in the capital Valletta). In our hotel at the very utmost northern point of the island we only ever saw four sparrows. Towards the end of our fortnight we managed to see a few baskets of racing pigeons being let off from the Gozo ferry terminal (training tosses from fanciers at the southern end of the island).

This absence of wild birds is apparently down to the indiscriminate hunting and shooting of all types of birds. So acute is the problem of indiscriminate hunting in Malta that there are almost no resident species of wild birds on the Islands. The few that manage to survive usually share most if not all of the following characteristics: they are either so small that they do not provide an adequate target to hunters, or have an unattractive plumage and call which do not attract the attention of hunters or trappers, or are insectivores which cannot survive out of their habitat.

These include the Spanish sparrow, tree sparrow, Sardinian warbler, spectacled warbler, cetti's warbler and zitting cisticola. Yet a few other birds such as the Cory's shearwater, European storm-petrel and blue rock thrush inhabit and nest in almost inaccessible places such as the tops of sea cliffs.

If given a chance, a number of other birds would certainly breed in Malta on a regular basis, as these have already been recorded breeding over there. Amongst such birds are the peregrine falcon, starling, quail, turtledove, barn swallow, house martin, short-toed lark, moorhen and little ringed plover.

Hunting and trapping is a very big problem in Malta. Hundreds of thousands of birds are shot and trapped every year. They are shot both from land and from powerboats out at sea, (this is where the larger number is shot).