Club Dead

I didn’t get worked up about the killing of Prospect Park’s Canada geese. There are better ways of managing overpopulations of species that do too well in association with people, but otherwise I wasn’t particularly moved. I know other people were, to the extent of holding a vigil for the dead birds. But Canada geese are one of those species which is co-evolving with us: they will survive with us into the future even as we limit and extinguish other species and continue to whittle down biodiversity. As such, they’re a distraction.

Case in point. This is something I was not at all aware of. Jonathan Franzen’s article in the New Yorker of July 26 (‘net version is subscription only, but perhaps that will change soon) documents the slaughter of songbirds in the Mediterranean for sport and food. The storied sea is a vital route for billions of birds migrating between Eurasia and Africa, and it’s a deadly gauntlet. Franzen highlights the wanton slaughter on Cyprus, Malta, and Italy, where machismo, a fuck-the-law-and-the-EU ethos, endemic corruption, and dubious “tradition” combine together to kill tens of millions of birds every year.

On Cyprus, many still use birdlime, one of the oldest ways of trapping birds. A sticky substance is smeared on sticks; the birds’ feathers become stuck to the gunk; Shakespeare uses the birdlime metaphor a number of times, but in reality it’s basically a low-tech animal lynching. Savvier Cypriots use mist nets; their main target is the blackcap, a warbler that’s a local delicacy, but their methods kill everything else, up to 10 million birds a year on that one little island. Quite an achievement; my sympathy for that divided island has take a serious hit.

On gun-happy Malta, meanwhile, it’s a cannonade of birdshot. It’s the same in Italy, up and down the peninsula, a vital route into and out of the rest of Europe for birds. A campaigner against the slaughter in Sicily, noting that the Italian for bird, uccello, is slang for penis, has worked up a poster that basically tells the boys that their dicks are dead birds. Hit ‘em where it hurts. Unsurprisingly, the Italian killings are completely bound up in the profound corruption of the Camorra state and the Berlusconi regime.

It behooves us to recall that a little over a century ago, this kind of slaughter used to be standard practice here in the U.S. Market hunters would bring down anything they could hit with the spatter of shotgun pellets. The passenger pigeon was blasted to extinction this way. What eventually became Hawk Mountain was notorious for its raptor massacres.

This proves it can be stopped.

Check out the militant work of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter and the more corporate Birdlife International for more information.