After flamingo massacre, poachers target highly-protected osprey

Injured osprey is recovered from a field in Bidnija in another poaching incident involving protected birds

6 October 2021, 6:38pm
by Kurt Sansone

2 min read

The injured osprey dropped from the sky in Bidnija and a vet later confirmed it had been shot (Photo: BirdLife)

An osprey, a highly-protected bird of prey, was shot down in Bidnija by unidentified poachers on Wednesday in the second such incident in less than a week.

The injured osprey fell down in front of the eyes of a passer-by who was driving in the area in the afternoon, BirdLife said in a statement.

The individual called police for assistance and also informed BirdLife after the bird just missed his car.

The osprey was spotted by a passer-by who informed the police and BirdLife (Photo: BirdLife)

BirdLife said officers from the Environmental Protection Unit (EPU) went on site and recovered the injured bird which was taken to the government vet, who later certified that it had been illegally shot.

The osprey is a raptor species which is highly-prized by trophy hunters for taxidermy. Hundreds of these birds are on the wish list of hunters with unverified taxidermy lists and who benefited from past amnesties.

Earlier this week, BirdLife Malta released statistics which show that over 523 illegally shot birds were recovered so far in the past four years alone (2018-2021) when compared to the 190 killings in the previous four-year period (2014-2017). This drastic increase reflects the upward trend in rampant illegal killing of birds, the organisation said.

The latest incident involving the osprey comes hot on the heels of a massacre of flamingos last Saturday at Qawra Point.

Miguel Zammit, 23, has been charged with killing four flamingos and is currently in custody as his case continues.

“Today’s incident continues to pile pressure on the Maltese government to take action against illegal hunting and heed our call to immediately resume the verification process of stuffed protected bird collections,” BirdLife said.

An exercise to regularise stuffed bird collections and tag them had stopped but an initial exercise had established that hunters had inflated collection numbers. This left room for abuse since poachers may try to pass off recently killed protected birds as part of their old collection.

Kurt Sansone is Executive Editor of MaltaToday. He was formerly deputy editor of MaltaTod...