Bird culling figures ‘exaggerated’, says ornithologist witness in libel case

The defence for MaltaToday editor Saviour Balzan described a libel case filed over comments he passed on an ornithology publication authored by Natalino Fenech, the former PBS head of news, as “ridiculous”.

Fenech claims that Balzan’s claim that he had misrepresented the figure of turtle doves killed by Maltese hunters in the book Fatal Flight, were defamatory.

But retired ornithologist and former Birdlife Malta president Joe Sultana, testified in court that he believed the figures of turtle doves killed mentioned in the book’s foreword “may have been exaggerated”.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Andrew Borg Cardona, pointed out that figure had been cited in a book to which he himself had penned its foreword. But Sultana said that at the time he had not read the entire book, and he might have later seen the figures as higher than they actually were; but he felt that the he had to promote it as it was serving a cause he endorsed.

“After this,” he said,  “I felt that some of the numbers may have been exaggerated.”

“I believe Fenech had used a formula, which he would take to taxidermists, based on number of hunters and reached a different figure. The figure may have been slightly inflated. There were no figures before. I calculated the figures of turtle doves killed on the basis of every hunter, there being 10,000, catching 10 turtle doves.”

Borg Cardona pointed out that the numbers given by Fenech were higher than those reported by everyone else and that this was borne out “by the facts in the books… Everyone had their own method of reaching the number of birds killed.”

Sultana, who spent 10 years as secretary of the Malta Ornithological Society and 12 years as president of MOS and BirdLife Malta, knew Fenech and Balzan when the two were MOS members.

“My relationship with Fenech was a good one whilst we were in Birdlife,” Sultana said.

Fenech later became a journalist for The Times, during which Sultana said a disagreement with BirdLife Malta developed. Sultana said that the president of the hunters’ association FKNK had filed a libel suit against Fenech, but Birdlife was not prepared to pay all the expenses of the case, which he eventually lost. “Fenech felt that he was entitled to reimbursement for all expenses,” Sultana said. 

Sultana also said that Fenech later would ignore news items involving BirdLife and instead give prominence to an organization like Nature Trust, when asked how the conservationist organization was treated by the journalist, who later became head of news at PBS. 

Sultana said Fenech, now a geographer at the University of Malta, had penned Fatal Flight as a book exposing the ugly side of hunting and trapping practices, but said that the numbers of birds killed in the “may have been slightly exaggerated, as at the time there were no records so some numbers are based on speculation.” 

He said he later heard that Fenech “had become friends” with FKNK chief executive Lino Farrugia when asked about his ties with the hunting fraternity.