The southeastern corner of the Republic of Cyprus has been heavily developed for foreign tourism in recent years. Large medium-rise hotels, specializing in vacation packages for Germans and Russians, overlook beaches occupied by sunbeds and umbrellas in orderly ranks, and the Mediterranean is nothing if not extremely blue. You can spend a very pleasant week here, driving the modern roads and drinking the good local beer, without suspecting that the area harbors the most intensive songbird-killing operations in the European Union.
On the last day of April, I went to the prospering tourist town of Protaras to meet four members of a German bird-protection organization, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), that runs seasonal volunteer “camps” in Mediterranean countries. Because the peak season for songbird trapping in Cyprus is autumn, when southbound migrants are loaded up with fat from a northern summer’s feasting, I was worried that we might not see any action, but the first orchard we walked into, by the side of a busy road, was full of lime sticks: straight switches, about thirty inches long, that are coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum and deployed artfully, to provide inviting perches, in the branches of low trees. The CABS team, which was led by a skinny, full-bearded young Italian named Andrea Rutigliano, fanned into the orchard, taking down the sticks, rubbing them in dirt to neutralize the glue, and breaking them in half. All the sticks had feathers on them. In a lemon tree, we found a male collared flycatcher hanging upside down like a piece of animal fruit, its tail and its legs and its black-and-white wings stuck in glue. While it twitched and futilely turned its head, Rutigliano videoed it from multiple angles, and an older Italian volunteer, Dino Mensi, took still photographs. “The photos are important,” said Alex Heyd, a sober-faced German who is the organization’s general secretary, “because you win the war in the newspapers, not in the field.”
In hot sunshine, the two Italians worked together to free the flycatcher, gently liberating individual feathers, applying squirts of diluted soap to soften the resistant gum, and wincing when a feather was lost. Rutigliano then carefully groomed gum from the bird’s tiny feet. “You have to get every bit of lime off,” he said. “The first year I was doing this, I left a bit on the foot of one bird and saw it fly and get stuck again. I had to climb the tree.” Rutigliano put the flycatcher in my hands, I opened them, and it flew off low through the orchard, resuming its northward journey.
We were surrounded by traffic noise, melon fields, housing developments, hotel complexes. David Conlin, a beefy British military veteran, threw a bundle of disabled sticks into some weeds and said, “It’s shocking—that you can stop anywhere around here and find these.” I watched Rutigliano and Mensi work to free a second bird, a wood warbler, a lovely yellow-throated thing. It felt wrong to be seeing at such close range a species that ordinarily requires careful work with binoculars to get a decent view of. It felt literally disenchanting. I wanted to say to the wood warbler what St. Francis of Assisi is said to have said when he saw a captured wild animal: “Why did you let yourself be caught?”
As we were leaving the orchard, Rutigliano suggested that Heyd turn his CABS T-shirt inside out, so that we would look more like ordinary tourists taking a walk. In Cyprus, it’s permissible to enter any private land that isn’t fenced, and all forms of songbird trapping have been criminal offenses since 1974, but what we were doing still felt to me high-handed and possibly dangerous. The team, in its black and drab clothing, looked more like commandos than like tourists. A local woman, perhaps the orchard’s owner, watched without expression as we headed inland on a dirt lane. Then a man in a pickup truck passed us, and the team, fearing that he might be going ahead to take down lime sticks, followed him at a trot.
In the man’s back yard, we found two pairs of twenty-foot-long metal pipes propped up in parallel on lawn chairs: a small-scale lime-stick factory of the sort that can provide good income for the mostly older Cypriot men who know the trade. “He’s manufacturing them and keeping a few for himself,” Rutigliano said. He and the others strolled brazenly around the man’s chicken coop and rabbit cages, taking down a few empty sticks and laying them on the pipes. We then trespassed up a hillside and back down into an orchard crisscrossed by irrigation hoses and full of trapped birds. “Questo giardino è un disastro!” said Mensi, who spoke only Italian.
A female blackcap had torn most of its tail off and was stuck not only by both legs and both wings but also by the bill, which sprang open as soon as Rutigliano unglued it; it began to cry out furiously. When the bird was freed altogether, he squirted a little water in its mouth and set it on the ground. It fell forward and flopped piteously, pushing its head into the mud. “It’s been hanging so long that its leg muscles are overstretched,” he said. “We’ll keep it tonight, and it can fly tomorrow.”
“Even without a tail?” I said.
“Certainly.” He scooped up the bird and stowed it in an outer pocket of his backpack.
Blackcaps are one of Europe’s most common warblers and the traditional national delicacy of Cyprus, where they’re known as ambelopoulia. They are the main target of Cypriot trappers, but the by-catch of other species is enormous: rare shrikes, other warblers, larger birds like cuckoos and golden orioles, even small owls and hawks. Stuck in lime in the second orchard were five collared flycatchers, a house sparrow, and a spotted flycatcher (formerly widespread, now becoming rare in much of northern Europe), as well as three more blackcaps. After the team members had sent them on their way, they wrangled about the tally of lime sticks at the site and settled on a figure of fifty-nine.
A little farther inland, in a dry and weedy grove with a view of the blue sea and the golden arches of a new McDonald’s, we found one active lime stick with one living bird hanging from it. The bird was a thrush nightingale, a gray-plumaged species that I had seen only once before. It was deeply tangled in lime and had broken a wing. “The break is between two bones, so it cannot recover,” Rutigliano said, palpating the joint through feathers. “Unfortunately, we need to kill this bird.”
It seemed likely that the thrush nightingale had been caught on a stick overlooked by a trapper who had taken down his other sticks that morning. While Heyd and Conlin discussed whether to get up before dawn the next day and try to “ambush” the trapper, Rutigliano stroked the head of the thrush nightingale. “He’s so beautiful,” he said, like a little boy. “I can’t kill him.”
“What should we do?” Heyd said.
“Maybe give him a chance to hop around on the ground and die on his own.”
“I don’t think there’s a good chance for it,” Heyd said.
Rutigliano put the bird on the ground and watched as it scurried, looking more mouselike than birdlike, under a small thornbush. “Maybe in a few hours he can walk better,” he said, unrealistically.
“Do you want me to make the decision?” Heyd said.
Rutigliano, without answering, wandered up the hill and out of sight.
“Where did it go?” Heyd asked me.
I pointed at the shrub. Heyd reached into it from two sides, captured the bird, held it gently in his hands, and looked up at me and Conlin. “Are we agreed?” he said, in German.
I nodded, and with a twist of his wrist he tore the bird’s head off.
The sun had expanded its reach across the entire sky, killing its blue with whiteness. As we scouted for an approach from which to ambush the grove, it was already hard to say how many hours we’d been walking. Every time we saw a Cypriot in a truck or a field, we had to duck down and backtrack over rocks and pants-piercing thistles, for fear that somebody would alert the owner of the trapping site. There was nothing larger at stake here than a few songbirds, there were no land mines on the hillside, and yet the blazing stillness had a flavor of wartime menace.
Lime-stick trapping has been traditional and widespread in Cyprus since at least the sixteenth century. Migratory birds were an important seasonal source of protein in the countryside, and older Cypriots today remember being told by their mothers to go out to the garden and catch some dinner. In more recent decades, ambelopoulia became popular with affluent, urbanized Cypriots as a kind of nostalgic treat—you might bring a friend a jar of pickled birds as a house gift, or you might order a platter of them fried in a restaurant for a special occasion. By the mid-nineties, two decades after the country had outlawed all forms of bird trapping, as many as ten million songbirds a year were being killed. To meet the restaurant demand, traditional lime-stick trapping had been augmented by large-scale netting operations, and the Cypriot government, which was trying to clean up its act and win membership in the European Union, cracked down hard on the netters. By 2006, the annual take had fallen to around a million.
In the past few years, however, with Cyprus now comfortably ensconced in the E.U., signs advertising illicit ambelopoulia have begun to reappear in restaurants, and the number of active trapping sites is rising. The Cypriot hunting lobby, which represents the republic’s fifty thousand hunters, is this year supporting two parliamentary proposals to relax anti-poaching laws. One would reduce lime-stick use to a misdemeanor; the other would decriminalize the use of electronic recordings to attract birds. Opinion polls show that, while most Cypriots disapprove of bird trapping, most also don’t think it’s a serious issue, and that many enjoy eating ambelopoulia. When the country’s Game Fund organized raids on restaurants serving the birds, the media coverage was roundly negative, leading with an account of food being pulled from the hands of a pregnant female diner.
“Food is sacred here,” said Martin Hellicar, the campaigns manager of BirdLife Cyprus, a local organization more averse to provocation than CABS is. “I don’t think you’ll ever get someone convicted for eating these things.”
Hellicar and I had spent a day touring netting sites in the country’s southeast corner. Any small olive grove can be used for netting, but the really big sites are in plantations of acacia, an alien species there’s no reason to irrigate if you’re not trapping birds. We saw these plantations everywhere. Long runners of cheap carpeting are laid down between rows of acacias; hundreds of metres of nearly invisible “mist” nets are strung from poles that are typically anchored in old car tires filled with concrete; and then, in the night, birdsong is played at high volume to lure migrants to rest in the lush acacias. In the morning, at first light, the poachers throw handfuls of pebbles to startle the birds into the nets. (A telltale sign of trapping is a mound of these pebbles dumped by the side of the road.) Since it’s a superstition among poachers that letting birds go free ruins a site, the unmarketable species are torn up and dropped on the ground or left to die in the nets. The marketable birds can fetch up to five euros apiece, and a well-run site can yield a thousand birds or more a day.
The worst area in Cyprus for poaching is the British military base on Cape Pyla. The British may be the bird-lovingest people in Europe, but the base, which leases its extensive firing ranges to Cypriot farmers, is in a delicate position diplomatically; after one recent enforcement sweep by the Army, twenty-two Sovereign Base Area signs were torn down by angry locals. Off the base, enforcement is hampered by logistics and politics. Poachers employ lookouts and night guards and have learned to erect little shacks on their sites, because Game Fund officers are required to get a warrant to search any “domicile,” and in the time it takes to do this the poachers can take down their nets and hide their electronic equipment. Because large-scale poachers are nowadays straight-up criminals, the officers are also afraid of violent attacks. “The biggest problem is that no one in Cyprus, not even the politicians, comes out and says that eating ambelopoulia is wrong,” the director of the Game Fund, Pantelis Hadjigerou, told me. Indeed, the recordholder for most ambelopoulia eaten in one sitting (fifty-four) was a popular politician in north Cyprus.
“Our ideal would be to find a well-known personality to come out and say, ‘I don’t eat ambelopoulia, it’s wrong,’ ” the director of BirdLife Cyprus, Clairie Papazoglou, said to me. “But there’s a little pact here that says that if anything bad happens it has to stay on the island, we can’t look bad to the outside world.”
“Before Cyprus joined the E.U.,” Hellicar said, “the trappers said, We’ll pull back for a while. Now, for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, there’s a kind of patriotic machismo to poaching. It’s a symbol of resistance to Big Brother E.U.”
What seemed Orwellian to me was Cyprus’s internal politics. It’s been thirty-six years since Turkey occupied the northern part of the island, and the ethnically Greek south has prospered immensely since then, but the national news is still dominated, seven days a week, by the Cyprus Problem. “Every other issue is swept under the carpet, everything else is insignificant,” the Cypriot social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis told me. “They say, ‘How dare you take us to European Court for something as stupid as birds? We’re taking Turkey to court!’ There was never any serious debate about joining the E.U.—it was simply the means by which we were going to solve the Cyprus Problem.”
The European Union’s most powerful instrument of conservation is its landmark Birds Directive, which was issued in 1979 and requires member states to protect all European bird species and preserve sufficient habitat for them. Since joining the E.U., in 2004, Cyprus has received repeated warnings from the European Commission for infringement of the directive, but it has so far avoided judgments and fines; if a member state’s environmental laws accord on paper with the directive, the commission is reluctant to interfere with sovereign enforcement.
Cyprus’s nominally Communist ruling party ardently embraces private development. The tourism ministry is touting plans to build fourteen new residential golf complexes (the island currently has three), even though the country has very limited supplies of fresh-water. Anyone who owns land reachable by road can build on it, and, as a result, the countryside is remarkably fragmented. I visited four of the southeast’s most important nature preserves, all of them theoretically due special protection under E.U. regulations, and was uniformly depressed by their condition. The big seasonal lake at Paralimni, for example, near where I was patrolling with the CABS people, is a noisy dust bowl commandeered for an illegal shooting range and an illegal motocross course, carpeted with shotgun shells, and extensively littered with construction debris, discarded large appliances, and household trash.
And yet birds still come to Cyprus; they have no choice. Returning to town at some less white-skied hour, the CABS patrol stopped to admire a black-headed bunting, a jewel of gold and black and chestnut, that was singing from the top of a bush. For a moment, our tension abated, and we were all just bird-watchers exclaiming in our native languages.
“Ah, che bello!”
“Fantastic!”
“Unglaublich schön!”
Before we quit for the day, Rutigliano wanted to make one last stop, at an orchard where the previous year a CABS volunteer had been roughed up by trappers. As we were turning, in the team’s rental car, off the main highway and up a dirt track, a red four-seater pickup truck was coming down the track, and its driver made a neck-slicing gesture at us. After the truck had moved onto the highway, two of its passengers leaned out of windows to give us the finger.
Heyd, the sober German, wanted to turn around and leave immediately, but the others argued that there was no reason to think the men were coming back. We proceeded up to the orchard and found it hung with four collared flycatchers and one wood warbler, which, because it couldn’t get airborne, Rutigliano gave to me to put in my backpack. When all the lime sticks had been destroyed, Heyd again, more nervously, suggested that we leave. But there was another grove in the distance which the two Italians wanted to investigate. “I don’t have a bad feeling,” Rutigliano said.
“There’s an English expression, ‘Don’t press your luck,’ ” Conlin said.
At that moment, the red pickup sped back into sight, fifty yards down the slope from us, and stopped with a lurch. Three men jumped out and began running toward us, picking up baseball-size rocks and hurling them at us as they ran. I would have guessed that it was easy to dodge a few flying rocks, but it wasn’t so easy, and Conlin and Heyd were hit by them. Rutigliano was shooting video, Mensi was taking pictures, and there was a lot of confused shouting—“Keep shooting, keep shooting!” “Call the police!” “What the hell is the number?” Mindful of the warbler in my backpack, and not eager to be mistaken for a CABS member, I followed Heyd as he retreated up the slope. From a not very safe distance, we stopped and watched two men attacking Mensi, trying to pull his backpack from his shoulders and his camera from his hands. The men, who were in their thirties and deeply suntanned, were shouting, “Why do you do this? Why do you make photos?” Mensi, keening terribly, his muscles bulging, was clutching the camera to his stomach. The men picked him up, threw him down, and fell on him; there ensued a blur of fighting. I couldn’t see Rutigliano but later learned that he was being hit in the face, knocked to the ground, and kicked in the legs and the ribs. His video camera was smashed on a rock; Mensi was also hit in the head with it. Conlin was standing amid the fray with formidable military bearing, holding two cell phones and trying to dial the police. He said to me, later, that he’d told the attackers that he would drag them through every court in the country if they touched him.
Heyd had continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked, too.
Running from danger is like no other kind of running—it’s hard to look where you’re going. I jumped a stone fence and dashed through a field full of brambles, found myself stumbling into a ditch and getting hit in the chin by a piece of metal fencing, and decided: That’s enough of that. I was worried about the warbler I was carrying. I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden’s owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I’d blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. “Barbarians!” the daughter translated.
Back down by the rental car, under clouds threatening rain, Mensi was touching his ribs gently and dabbing at the cuts and abrasions that covered his arms; both his camera and his backpack had been stolen. Conlin showed me the smashed video camera, and Rutigliano, who had lost his glasses and was limping heavily, confessed to me, with matter-of-fact fanaticism, “I wanted something like this to happen. Just not this bad.”
A second CABS team had arrived and was milling around with grim expressions. In its car was an empty wine carton into which, as a police cruiser was pulling up, I was able to transfer the wood warbler, which was looking subdued but no worse for the wear. I would have felt better about its rescue had there not been, on my cell phone, a new text message from a Cypriot friend of mine, confirming our clandestine date to eat ambelopoulia the following night. I was managing to half-convince myself that I could simply be a good journalistic observer and not personally have to eat one; but it wasn’t at all clear how I could avoid it.
Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean. As its waters are fished clean by trawlers with sonar and efficient nets, its skies are vacuumed clean of migrants by the extremely effective technology of birdsong recordings. Since the nineteen-seventies, as a result of the Birds Directive and various other conservation treaties, the situation of some of the most endangered bird species has improved somewhat. But hunters throughout the Mediterranean are now seizing on this marginal improvement and pushing back. Cyprus recently experimented with a spring season on quail and turtledove; Malta, in April, opened its own spring season; and Italy’s parliament, in May, passed a law that extends the fall season there. While Europeans may think of themselves as models of environmental enlightenment—they certainly lecture the United States and China on carbon emissions as if they were—the populations of many resident and migratory birds in Europe have been collapsing alarmingly in the past ten years. You don’t have to be a bird-watcher to miss the calling of the cuckoo, the circling of lapwings over fields, the singing of corn buntings from utility poles. A world of birds already battered by habitat loss and intensive agriculture is being hastened toward extinction by hunters and trappers. Spring in the Old World is liable to fall silent far sooner than in the New.
The Republic of Malta, which consists of several densely populated chunks of limestone with collectively less than twice the area of the District of Columbia, is the most savagely bird-hostile place in Europe. There are twelve thousand registered hunters (about three per cent of the country’s population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird’s protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the side of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; non-rarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, so as not to incriminate their shooters. When bird-watchers in Italy see a migrant that’s missing a chunk of its wing or its tail, they call it “Maltese plumage.”
In the nineteen-nineties, in the runup to Malta’s accession to the E.U., the government began to enforce an existing law against shooting non-game species, and Malta became a cause célèbre among groups as far-flung as the U.K.’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which sent volunteers to assist with law enforcement. As a result, in the words of a British volunteer I spoke to, “the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious.” But Maltese hunters, who argue that the country is too small for its shooting to make a meaningful dent in European bird populations, fiercely resent what they see as foreign interference in their “tradition.” The national hunters’ organization, the Federazzjoni Kaċċaturi Nassaba Konservazzjonisti, said in its April, 2008, newsletter, “FKNK believes that the police’s work should only be done by Maltese police and not by arrogant foreign extremists who think Malta is theirs because it’s in the EU.”
When, in 2006, the local bird group BirdLife Malta hired a Turkish national, Tolga Temuge, a former Greenpeace campaigns director, to launch an aggressive campaign against illegal hunting, hunters were reminded of Malta’s siege by the Turks, in 1565, and reacted with explosive rage. The F.K.N.K.’s general secretary, Lino Farugia, inveighed against “the Turk” and his “Maltese lackeys,” and there ensued a string of threats and attacks on BirdLife’s property and personnel. A BirdLife member was shot in the face; three cars belonging to BirdLife volunteers were set on fire; and several thousand young trees were uprooted at a reforestation site that hunters resent for its competition with the main island’s only other forest, which they control and shoot roosting birds in. As a widely read hunters magazine explained in August, 2008, “there is a limit to what extent one can expect to stretch the strong moral ties and values of Maltese families and stop their Latin blood from boiling over and expect them to give up their land and culture in a cowardly retreat.”
And yet, in contrast to Cyprus, Maltese public opinion is strongly anti-hunting. Along with banking, tourism is Malta’s main industry, and the newspapers frequently print angry letters from tourists who have been menaced by hunters or have witnessed avian atrocities. The Maltese middle class itself is unhappy that the country’s very limited open space is overrun by trigger-happy hunters who post “No Trespassing” signs on public land. Unlike BirdLife Cyprus, BirdLife Malta has succeeded in enlisting prominent citizens, including the owner of the Radisson Hotel group, in a media campaign called “Reclaiming YOUR Countryside.”
Malta is a two-party country, however, and because its national elections are typically decided by a few thousand votes, neither the Labour Party nor the Nationalists can afford to alienate their hunting constituents so much that they stay away from the polls. Enforcement of hunting laws therefore continues to be lax: minimal manpower is devoted to it, many local police are friendly with hunters, and even the good police can be lethargic in responding to complaints. Even when offenders are prosecuted, Maltese courts have been reluctant to fine them more than a few hundred euros.
This year, the Nationalist government opened the country’s spring season on quail and turtledove in defiance of a European Court of Justice ruling last fall. The E.U. Birds Directive permits member states to apply “derogations” and allow the killing of small numbers of protected species for “judicious use,” such as control of bird flocks around airports, or subsistence hunting by traditional rural communities. The Maltese government had sought a derogation for continuing the “tradition” of spring hunting, which the directive normally forbids, and the Court had ruled that Malta’s proposal failed three of four tests provided by the directive: strict enforcement, small numbers, and parity with other E.U. member states. Regarding the fourth test, however—whether an “alternative” exists—Malta presented evidence, in the form of bag counts, that autumn hunting of quail and turtledove was not a satisfactory alternative to spring hunting. Although the government was aware that the bag counts were unreliable (the F.K.N.K.’s general secretary himself once publicly admitted that the actual bag might be ten times higher than the reported count), the European Commission has a policy of trusting the data presented by the governments of member states. Malta further argued that, because quail and turtledove aren’t globally threatened species (they’re still plentiful in Asia), they didn’t merit absolute protection, and the commission’s lawyers failed to point out that what counted was the species’ status within the E.U., where, in fact, their populations are in serious decline. The Court therefore, while ruling against Malta and forbidding a spring hunt, did allow that it had passed one of the four tests. And the government, at home, proclaimed a “victory” and proceeded, in early April, to authorize a hunt.
I joined Tolga Temuge, who looks like a Turkish David Foster Wallace, on an early-morning patrol on the first day of the season. We weren’t expecting to see much shooting, because the F.K.N.K., angered by the government’s terms—the season would last only six half-days, instead of the traditional six to eight weeks, and only twenty-five hundred licenses would be granted—had organized a boycott of the season, threatening to “name and shame” any hunter who applied for a license. “The European Commission failed,” Temuge said as we drove the dark, dusty labyrinth of Malta’s road system. “The European hunting organization and BirdLife International did a lot of hard work to arrive at sustainable hunting limits, and then Malta joins the E.U., as the smallest member state, and threatens to bring down the whole edifice of the excellent Birds Directive. Malta’s disregard for it is setting a bad precedent for other member states, especially in the Mediterranean, to behave the same way.”
When the sky lightened, we stopped in a rough limestone lane, amid walled fields of golden hay, and listened for gunshots. I heard dogs barking, a cock crowing, trucks shifting gears, and, somewhere nearby, electronic quailsong playing. Patrolling elsewhere on the island were six other of Temuge’s teams, staffed mainly by foreign volunteers, with a few hired Maltese security men. As the sun came up, we began to hear distant gunshots, but not many; the country seemed essentially bird-free that morning. We proceeded through a village in which a couple of shots rang out—“Fucking unbelievable!” Temuge cried. “This is a residential area! Fucking unbelievable!”—and back into the stony maze of walls that passes for countryside in Malta. Further gunshots led us to a small field in which two men in their thirties were standing with a handheld radio. As soon as they saw us, they picked up hoes and began tending lush plantings of beans and onions. “Once you’re in the area, they know,” Temuge said. “Everybody knows. If they have radios, it’s ninety per cent sure they’re hunters.” It did indeed seem awfully early to be out doing hoe-work, and as long as we were standing by the field we heard no more shots. Four blazing male golden orioles flashed by, unlucky to have chosen Malta as a migratory stopover but lucky that we were standing there. In a low tree I spotted a female chaffinch, which is one of the most common birds in Europe and is all but absent in Malta, owing to the country’s widespread illegal finch trapping. Temuge became very excited when I called it out. “A chaffinch!” he said. “That would be incredible, if we’re starting to have breeding chaffinch here again.” It was like somebody in North America being amazed to see a robin.
Maltese hunters are in the weak position of wanting something that would get Malta into real, punishable trouble with the E.U.: the legal right to shoot birds bound for their breeding grounds. Their leaders at the F.K.N.K. thus have little choice but to adopt uncompromising positions, such as this spring’s boycott, which raises false hopes in the F.K.N.K. rank and file, fostering frustration and feelings of betrayal when, inevitably, the government disappoints them. I met with the F.K.N.K.’s spokesman, Joseph Perici Calascione, a nervous but articulate man, at the organization’s cramped, cluttered headquarters. “How could anybody, in their wildest imagination, expect us to be satisfied with a spring season that left eighty per cent of hunters unable to get a license?” Perici Calascione said. “We’ve already gone two years without a season that was part of our tradition, part of our living. We weren’t looking for a season as it was three years ago, but still a reasonable season, which the government had promised us in no uncertain terms before accession to the E.U.”
I brought up the matter of illegal shooting, and Perici Calascione offered me a Scotch. When I declined, he poured himself one. “We’re completely against the illegal shooting of protected species,” he said. “We’re prepared to have hunting marshals in place to spot these individuals, and take away their membership. And this would have been in place, had we been given a good season.” Perici Calascione conceded that he was uncomfortable with the more incendiary statements of the F.K.N.K.’s general secretary, but he himself became visibly distressed as he tried to convey how much hunting mattered to him; he sounded strangely like a victimized environmentalist. “Everybody is frustrated,” he said, with a tremor in his voice. “Psychiatric incidents have increased, we’ve had suicides among our membership—our culture is threatened.”
Just how much Maltese-style shooting is a “culture” and a “tradition” is debatable. While spring hunting and the killing and taxidermy of rare birds are unquestionably traditions of long standing, the phenomenon of indiscriminate slaughter seems not to have arisen until the nineteen-sixties, when Malta achieved its independence and began to prosper. Malta, indeed, represents a stark refutation of the theory that a society’s affluence leads to better environmental stewardship. Affluence in Malta brought more sophisticated weapons, more money to pay taxidermists, and more cars and better roads, which made the countryside more easily accessible to hunters. Where hunting had once been a tradition handed down from father to son, it now became the pastime of young men who went out in unruly groups.
On a piece of land belonging to a hotel that hopes to build a golf course on it, I met with an old-fashioned hunter who is disgusted with his countrymen’s bad behavior and with the F.K.N.K.’s tolerance of it. He told me that undisciplined shooting is in the Maltese “blood,” and that it was unreasonable to expect hunters to suddenly change after the country joined the E.U. (“If you were born of a prostitute,” he said, “you won’t become a nun.”) But he also put much of the blame on younger hunters and said that Malta’s lowering of the hunting age from twenty-one to eighteen had made matters worse. “And now that they’ve changed the spring-hunting law,” he said, “law-abiding people can’t go out, but the indiscriminate shooters still go out, because there’s not enough law enforcement. I’ve been in the country for three weeks this spring, and I’ve seen one police car.”
Spring was always the main hunting season in Malta, and the hunter said that if the season is closed permanently he will probably keep hunting in the fall only as long as his two dogs live, and then quit and be just a bird-watcher. “Something else is happening,” he said. “Because where are the turtledoves? When I was young and going out with my father, we’d look up at the sky and see thousands of them. Now it’s peak season, and I was out all day yesterday and saw twelve. I haven’t seen a nightjar in two years. I haven’t seen a rock thrush in five years. Last autumn, I went out every morning and afternoon looking for woodcock, with my dogs, and I saw three of them and didn’t fire once. And that’s part of the problem: people get frustrated. ‘I don’t find a woodcock, so let’s shoot a kestrel.’ ”
Late on a Sunday afternoon, from a secluded height, Temuge and I used a telescope to spy on two men who were scanning the sky and fields with binoculars. “They’re definitely hunters,” Temuge said. “They keep their guns hidden until something comes by for them to shoot.” But, as an hour passed and nothing came by, the men picked up rakes and began weeding a garden, only occasionally returning to their binoculars, and then another hour passed and they worked harder in the garden, because there were no birds.
Italy is a long, narrow gantlet for a winged migrant to run. Poachers in Brescia, in the north, trap a million songbirds annually for sale to restaurants offering pulenta e osei—polenta with little birds. The woods of Sardinia are full of wire snares, the Venetian wetlands are a slaughtering ground for wintering ducks, and Umbria, the home of St. Francis, has more registered hunters per capita than any other region. Hunters in Tuscany pursue their quotas of woodcock and wood pigeon and four legally shootable songbirds, including song thrush and skylark; but at dawn, in the mist, it’s hard to distinguish legal from illegal quarry, and who’s keeping track anyway? To the south, in Campania, much of which is controlled by the Camorra (the local mafia), the most inviting habitat for migratory waterfowl and waders is in fields flooded by the Camorra and rented to hunters for up to a thousand euros a day; songbird wholesalers from Brescia bring down refrigerated trucks to collect the take from small-time poachers; entire Campanian provinces are blanketed with traps for seven tuneful European finch species, and flush Camorristi pay handsomely for well-trained singers at the illegal bird markets there. Farther south, in Calabria and Sicily, the highly publicized springtime hunting of migrating honey buzzards has been reduced by intensive law enforcement and volunteer monitoring, but Calabria, especially, is still full of poachers who, if they can get away with it, will shoot anything that flies.
A curious old statute in Italy’s civil code, enacted by the Fascists to encourage familiarity with firearms, gives hunters, and only hunters, the right to enter private property, regardless of who owns it, in pursuit of game. By the nineteen-eighties, there were more than two million licensed hunters running wild in the Italian countryside, which had emptied out as the population flowed into the cities. Most urban Italians dislike hunting, however, and in 1992 the Italian parliament passed one of Europe’s more restrictive hunting laws, which included, most radically, a declaration that all wild fauna belong exclusively to the Italian state, thereby reducing hunting to a special concession. In the two decades since then, the populations of some of Italy’s most lovable megafauna, including wolves, have rebounded spectacularly, while the number of licensed hunters has fallen below eight hundred thousand. These two trends have prompted Franco Orsi, a Ligurian senator from Silvio Berlusconi’s party, to propose a law that would liberalize the use of decoy birds and expand the times and places in which hunting is permitted. A second, “communitary” law, intended to bring Italy into compliance with the Birds Directive and thereby avoid hundreds of millions of euros in fines pending against it, has just been passed by the parliament and includes at least one clear victory for hunters: a shifting of the hunting season for certain bird species into February.
I met with Orsi at his party’s offices in Genoa, on the eve of regional elections that brought fresh gains for Berlusconi’s coalition. Orsi, a handsome, soft-eyed man in his forties, is a passionate hunter who chooses vacation destinations on the basis of what he can shoot in them. His argument for updating the 1992 law is that it has led to an explosive increase of harmful species; that Italian hunters should be allowed to do whatever French and Spanish hunters do; that private landowners could manage land for game better than the state does; and that hunting is a socially and spiritually beneficial activity. He showed me a newspaper picture of wild boar running down a Genoese street; he described the menace posed by starlings at airports and in vineyards. But when I agreed that controlling boar and starlings is a good idea, he went on to say that hunters don’t like killing boar in the season the authorities want them to. “And, anyway, I can’t accept that hunting is only for wild boar, nutria, and starlings,” he said. “That’s something the Army can do.”
I asked Orsi if he favored hunting every bird species to the maximum compatible with sustaining existing numbers.
“Let’s imagine fauna as capital that every year produces interest,” he said. “If I spend the interest, I can still keep the capital, and the future of the species and of hunting will be preserved.”
“But there’s also the investment strategy of reinvesting part of the interest, to grow the capital,” I said.
“That depends on each species. There’s an optimal density for each one, and some have a density that’s larger than optimal, others smaller. So hunting has to regulate the balance.”
My impression, from earlier visits to Italy, was that its avian populations are pretty much all sub-optimal. Since Orsi didn’t seem to share it, I asked him how he thought hunting harmless birds benefitted society. To my surprise, he quoted Peter Singer, the author of “Animal Liberation,” to the effect that, if every man had to kill the animals he eats, we would all be vegetarians. “In our urban society, we’ve lost the relationship between man and animal which has elements of violence,” Orsi said. “When I was fourteen, my grandfather made me kill a chicken, which was the family tradition, and now every time I eat chicken I remember that it was an animal. To go back to Peter Singer, the overconsumption of animals in our society corresponds to an overconsumption of resources. Huge amounts of space are devoted to wasteful, industrialized farming, because we’ve lost a sense of rural identity. We shouldn’t think that hunting is the only form of human violence against the environment. And hunting, in this sense, is educational.”
I thought Orsi had a point, but, to the Italian environmentalists I spoke with, his rhetoric proved only that he was skilled at handling journalists. Behind the national push to liberalize hunting laws, the ambientalisti all see the hand of Italy’s large arms and munitions industry. As one of them said to me, “When somebody asks you what your business produces, do you say, ‘Land mines that blow up Bosnian children,’ or do you say, ‘Traditional shotguns for people who enjoy waiting at dawn in a wetland for the ducks to come’?”
It’s impossible to know how many birds are shot in Italy. The annual reported take of song thrushes, for example, ranges from three million to seven million, but Fernando Spina, a senior scientist at Italy’s environmental-protection agency, considers these numbers “hugely conservative,” since only the most conscientious hunters fill out their game cards correctly, local game authorities lack the manpower to police the hunters, the provincial databases are largely uncomputerized, and most local Italian hunting authorities routinely ignore requests for data. What is known is that Italy is a crucial migratory flyway. Banded birds have been recovered there from every country in Europe, thirty-eight countries in Africa, and six in Asia. And return migration begins in Italy very early, in some cases as early as late December. The E.U.’s Birds Directive protects all birds on return migration, permitting hunting only within limits of natural autumn mortality, and most responsible hunters therefore believe that the season should end on December 31st. Italy’s new communitary law goes the other way, however, and extends the season into February. Since early-return migrants tend to be the fittest of their species, the new law makes targets of precisely those birds with the best chance of breeding success. A longer season also protects poachers of protected species, because an illegal gunshot sounds just like a legal one. And without good data nobody can say whether a region’s annual bag limit on a species falls within natural mortality. “The bag limit is an arbitrary number, set by local officials,” Spina said. “It has no relation to actual census numbers.”
Although habitat loss is the biggest reason that European bird populations are collapsing, Italian-style hunting (caccia selvaggia, “wild hunting,” its detractors call it) adds particular insult to the injury. When I asked Fulco Pratesi, a former big-game hunter who founded W.W.F. Italy and who now considers hunting “a mania,” why Italian hunters are so wild to kill birds, he cited his countrymen’s love of weapons, their attachment to an “attitude of virility,” their delight in breaking laws, and, strangely, their love of being in nature. “It’s like a rapist who loves women but expresses it in a violent and perverse way,” Pratesi said. “Birds that weigh twenty-two grams are being shot with thirty-two-gram ammunition.” Italians, he added, more easily feel affection for “symbolic” animals like wolves and bears, and have actually done a better job of protecting them than the rest of Europe has. “But birds are invisible,” he said. “We don’t see them, we don’t hear them. In northern Europe, the arrival of migrating birds is visible and audible, and it moves people. Here, people live in cities and large housing complexes, and birds are literally up in the air.”
For most of its history, Italy was visited every spring and fall by unimaginable numbers of packets of flying protein, and, unlike in northern Europe, where people learned to see the correlation between overharvesting and diminishing returns, supplies seemed limitless in the Mediterranean. A poacher from Reggio di Calabria, still bitter about being forbidden to shoot honey buzzards, said to me, “We were only killing about twenty-five hundred a spring in Reggio, out of a total passage of sixty to a hundred thousand—it wasn’t a big deal.” The only way he could understand the banning of his sport was in terms of money. He told me, in all seriousness, that certain organizations that wanted to tap into state money had set themselves up as anti-poachers, and that it was their need for poachers to oppose which had led to the writing of anti-poaching laws. “And now these people are getting rich with money from the state,” he explained.
In one of the southern provinces, I got to know an impishly boyish ex-poacher named Sergio. He’d been well into middle age before giving up poaching, feeling that he’d finally outgrown that stage of life, and he now tells stories of his “sins of youth” for comic effect. Going hunting at night was always illegal but never a problem, Sergio said, if your poaching companions were the parish priest and the brigadier of the local carabiniere. The brigadier was especially helpful in discouraging forest rangers from patrolling in their neighborhood. One night, when Sergio was out hunting with him, they froze a barn owl in the headlights of the brigadier’s Jeep. The brigadier told Sergio to shoot it. When Sergio demurred, the brigadier took out a shovel, walked around behind the owl, and whacked it on the head. Then he put it in the rear compartment of the Jeep.
“Why?” I asked Sergio. “Why did he want to kill the owl?”
“Because we were poaching!”
At the end of the night, when the brigadier opened the rear compartment, the owl, which had only been stunned, flew up and attacked him—Sergio spread his arms and made a ridiculously ferocious face to show me how.
For Sergio, the point of poaching had always been eating. He taught me a rhyme in his local dialect which approximately translates: For meat of the feather, eat a crow; for a heart that’s kind, love a crone. “You can cook crow for six days, and it’s still tough,” he told me. “But it’s not bad in a broth. I also ate badger and fox—I ate everything.” The only bird that no Italian seems interested in eating is the seagull. Even the honey buzzard, although southern families traditionally kept one specimen stuffed and mounted in the best room of their house (its local nickname is adorno, for “adornment”), was eaten as a springtime treat; the poacher in Reggio gave me his recipe for fricasséeing it with sugar and vinegar.
Italian wild hunters who, unlike Sergio, haven’t outgrown the pursuit, and who are frustrated by declining game populations and increasing state restrictions, have learned to go elsewhere in the Mediterranean for a thrill. On the Campanian seacoast, I spoke with a gap-toothed, gleefully unrepentant young-old poacher who, now that he can no longer set up a blind on the beach and shoot unlimited numbers of arriving migrants, contents himself with looking forward to vacations in Albania, where you can still shoot as much as you can find of whatever you want, whenever you want, for a very low fee. Although hunters from all nations go abroad, the Italians are widely considered to be the worst. The wealthiest of them go to Siberia to shoot woodcock during their springtime display flights, or to Egypt, where, I was told, you can hire a local police officer to fetch your kills while you shoot ibises and globally threatened duck species until your arms are tired; there are pictures on the Internet of visiting hunters standing beside metre-high piles of bird carcasses.
The responsible hunters in Italy hate the wild ones; they hate Franco Orsi. “We have a culture clash in Italy between two visions of hunting,” Massimo Canale, a young hunter in Reggio di Calabria, told me. “One side, Orsi’s side, says, ‘Let’s just open it up.’ On the other side are people with a sense of responsibility for where they live. To become a selective hunter, you need more than just a license. You need to study biology, physics, ballistics. You become selective for boar and deer—you have a role to play.” Canale discovered his predatory instinct as a child, while hunting indiscriminately with his grandfather, and he feels fortunate to have met people who taught him a better way. “I don’t mind not killing something on any given day,” he said, “but killing is the goal, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. I have a conflict between my predatory instinct and my rationality, and my way of trying to tame my instinct is through selective hunting. In my opinion, it’s the only way to hunt in 2010. And Orsi doesn’t know or care about it.”
The two visions of hunting correspond broadly to Italy’s two faces. There’s the frankly criminal Italy of the Camorra and its allies and the quasi-criminal Italy of Berlusconi’s cronies, but there is also, still, l’Italia che lavora—“the Italy that works.” The Italians who combat poaching are motivated by disgust with their country’s lawlessness, and they rely heavily on tips from responsible hunters, like Canale, who become frustrated when, for example, they’re unable to find quail to shoot because all the birds have been attracted to illegal recordings. In Salerno, the least disorderly of Campania’s provinces, I joined a squad of W.W.F. guards who took me out to an artificial pond, now drained, where they had recently stalked the president of a regional hunters’ association and caught him illegally using electronic recordings to attract birds. Looming near the pond, amid fields rendered desolate by white plastic crop covers, was a disintegrating mountain of “ecoballs”—shrink-wrapped bales of Neapolitan garbage that had been dumped all over the Campanian countryside and become a symbol of Italy’s environmental crisis. “It was the second time in two years that we’d caught the guy,” the squad leader said. “He was part of the committee that regulates hunting in the region, and he’d remained president in spite of having been charged. There are other regional presidents who do the same thing but are harder to catch.”
One shining example of the Italy that works has been the suppression of honey-buzzard poaching at the Strait of Messina. Every year since 1985, the national forest police have assigned an extra team with helicopters to patrol the Calabrian side of the Strait. Although the Calabrian situation has lately deteriorated somewhat—this year’s team was smaller than in the past and stayed for fewer days, and the estimated death toll was four hundred, double the number in recent years—the Sicilian side of the Strait is the domain of a famous crusader, Anna Giordano, and remains essentially free of poachers. Beginning as a fifteen-year-old, in 1981, Giordano undertook surveillance of the concrete blinds from which raptors were being shot by the thousands as they sailed in low over the mountains above Messina. Unlike the Calabrians, who ate the buzzards, the Sicilians shot purely for the sake of tradition, for competition with one another, and for trophies. Some of them shot everything; others restricted themselves to honey buzzard (“The Bird,” they called it) unless they saw a real rarity, like golden eagle. Giordano hurried from the blinds to the nearest pay phone, from which she summoned the forest police, and then back to the blinds. Although her cars were vandalized, and although she was constantly threatened and vilified, she was never physically harmed, probably because she was a young woman. (The Italian word for “bird,” uccello, is also slang for “penis” and lent itself to dirty jibes about her, but a poster I saw on the wall of her office flipped these jibes around: “Your Virility? A Dead Bird.”) With increasing success, especially after the advent of cell phones, Giordano compelled the forest police to crack down on the poachers, and her growing fame brought media attention and legions of volunteers. In recent years, her teams have reported seasonal gunshot totals in the single digits.
“In the early years,” Giordano said when I joined her on a hilltop to look at passing hawks, “we didn’t even dare raise our binoculars when we were counting raptors, because the poachers would watch us and start shooting if they saw us looking at something. Our logs from back then show lots of ‘unidentified raptors.’ And now we can stand up here all afternoon, comparing the markings of first-calendar-year female harriers, and not hear a shot. A couple of years ago, one of the worst poachers, a violent, stupid, vulgar guy who’d always been in our face wherever we went, drove up to me and asked if we could talk. I was, like, ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh, O.K.’ He asked me if I remembered what I’d said to him twenty-five years ago. I said I couldn’t remember what I said yesterday. He said, ‘You said the day would come when I would love the birds instead of killing them. I just came up here to tell you you were right. I used to say to my son, when we were going out, Have you got the gun? Now I say, Have you got the binoculars?’ And I handed him my own binoculars—to a poacher!—so he could see a honey buzzard that was flying over.”
Giordano is small, dark, and zealous. She has lately been attacking the local government for failing to regulate housing development around Messina, and, as if to insure that she has too much to do, she also helps operate a wildlife rescue center. I’d already visited one Italian animal hospital, on the grounds of a shuttered psychiatric hospital in Naples, and seen an X-ray of a hawk heavily dotted with lead shot, several recovering raptors in large cages, and a seagull whose left leg was blackened and shrivelled from having stepped in acid. At Giordano’s center, on a hill behind Messina, I watched her feed scraps of raw turkey to a small eagle that had been blinded by a shotgun pellet. She grasped the eagle’s taloned legs in one hand and cradled the bird against her belly. Its tail feathers sadly bedraggled, its gaze stern but impotent, it suffered her to open its bill and stuff in meat until its gullet bulged. The bird seemed to me at once all eagle and no longer an eagle at all. I didn’t know what it was.
Like most Cypriot restaurants that serve ambelopoulia, the one I went to with a friend and a friend of his (I’ll call them Takis and Demetrios) had a small private dining room in which the little birds could be consumed discreetly. We walked through the main room, in which a TV was blaring one of the Brazilian soap operas that are popular in Cyprus, and sat down to an onslaught of Cypriot specialties: smoked pork, fried cheese, pickled caper twigs, wild asparagus and mushrooms with eggs, wine-soaked sausage, couscous. The proprietor also brought us three fried song thrushes, which we hadn’t asked for, and hovered by our table as if to make sure I ate mine. I thought of St. Francis, who had set aside his sympathy for animals once a year, on Christmas, and eaten meat. I thought of a kid named Woody, who, on a backpacking trip I’d taken as a teen-ager, had given me a bite of fried robin. I thought of a prominent Italian conservationist who’d admitted to me that song thrushes are “bloody tasty.” The conservationist was right. The meat was dark and richly flavorful, and the bird was enough bigger than an ambelopoulia that I could think of it as ordinary restaurant food, more or less, and of myself as an ordinary consumer.
After the proprietor went away, I asked Takis and Demetrios what kind of Cypriots like to eat ambelopoulia.
“The people who do it a lot,” Demetrios said, “are the same ones who go to cabarets, the lounges where there’s pole-dancing and Eastern European girls who make themselves available. In other words, people with not a high level of morality. Which is to say, most Cypriots. There’s a saying here, ‘Whatever you can stuff your mouth with, whatever your ass can grab—’ ”
“I.e., because life is short,” Takis said.
“People come to Cyprus and think they’re in a European country, because we belong to the E.U.,” Demetrios said. “In fact, we’re a Middle Eastern country that’s part of Europe by accident.”
The night before, at the Paralimni police station, I’d given a statement to a young detective who seemed to want me to say that the attackers of the CABS team had only been trying to get the team to stop taking pictures and video of them. “For people here,” the detective explained when we were done, “it’s a tradition to trap birds, and you can’t change that overnight. Trying to talk to them and explain why it’s wrong is more helpful than the aggressive approach of CABS.” He may have been right, but I’d been hearing the same plea for patience all over the Mediterranean, and it was sounding to me like a version of modern consumerism’s more general plea regarding nature: Just wait until we’ve used up everything, and then you nature-lovers can have what’s left.
While Takis and Demetrios and I waited for the dozen ambelopoulia that were coming, we argued about who was going to eat them. “Maybe I’ll take one small bite,” I said.
“I don’t even like ambelopoulia,” Takis said.
“Neither do I,” Demetrios said.
“O.K.,” I said. “How about if I take two and you each take five?”
They shook their heads.
Dismayingly soon, the proprietor returned with a plate. In the room’s harsh light, the ambelopoulia looked like a dozen little gleaming yellowish-gray turds. “You’re the first American I’ve ever served,” the proprietor said. “I’ve had lots of Russians, but never an American.” I put one on my plate, and the proprietor told me that eating it was the same as taking two Viagras.
When we were alone again, my field of vision shrank to a few inches, the way it had when I’d dissected a frog in ninth-grade biology. I made myself eat the two almond-size breast muscles, which were the only obvious meat; the rest was greasy cartilage and entrail and tiny bones. I couldn’t tell if the meat’s bitterness was real or the product of emotion, the killing of a blackcap’s enchantment. Takis and Demetrios were making short work of their eight birds, taking clean bones from their mouths and exclaiming that ambelopoulia were much better than they remembered; were rather good, in fact. I trashed a second bird and then, feeling somewhat sick, wrapped my remaining two in a paper napkin and put them in my pocket. The proprietor returned and asked if I’d enjoyed the birds.
“Mm!” I said.
“If you hadn’t asked for them”—this in a regretful tone—“I think you really would have liked the lamb tonight.”
I made no reply, but now, as if satisfied by my complicity, the proprietor became talkative: “Young kids today don’t like to eat them. It used to start young, and you’d get used to the taste. My toddler can eat ten at a time.”
Takis and Demetrios exchanged skeptical glances.
“It’s a shame they’ve been outlawed,” the proprietor went on, “because they used to be a great tourist attraction. Now it’s become almost like the drug trade. A dozen of them cost me sixty euros. These damned foreigners come and take down the nets and destroy them, and we’ve surrendered to them. Trapping ambelopoulia used to be one of the few ways people around here could make a good living.”
Outside, by the edge of the restaurant parking lot, near some bushes in which I’d earlier heard ambelopoulia singing, I knelt down and scraped a hole in the dirt with my fingers. The world was feeling especially empty of meaning, and the best I could do to fight this feeling was to unwrap the two dead birds from the napkin, put them in the hole, and tamp some dirt down on them. Then Takis led me to a nearby tavern with medium-sized birds grilling on charcoal outside. It was a sort of poor man’s cabaret, and as soon as we’d ordered beers at the bar one of the hostesses, a heavy-legged blonde from Moldova, pulled up a stool behind us.
The blue of the Mediterranean isn’t pretty to me anymore. The clarity of its water, prized by vacationers, is the clarity of a sterile swimming pool. There are few smells on its beaches, and few birds, and its depths are on their way to being empty; much of the fish now consumed in Europe comes illegally, no questions asked, from the ocean west of Africa. I look at the blue and see not a sea but a postcard, paper thin.
And yet it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the “Metamorphoses” deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and St. Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast. For St. Francis, the crested larks, whose drab brown plumage and peaked head feathers resemble the hooded brown robes of his Friars Minor, his Little Brothers, were a model for his order: wandering, as light as air, and saving up nothing, just gleaning their daily minimum of food, and always singing, singing. He addressed them as his Sister Larks. Once, by the side of an Umbrian road, he preached to the local birds, which are said to have gathered around him quietly and listened with a look of understanding, and then chastised himself for not having thought to preach to them sooner. Another time, when he wanted to preach to human beings, a flock of swallows was chattering noisily, and he said to them, either angrily or politely—the sources are unclear—“Sister Swallows, you’ve had your say. Now be quiet and let me have my say.” According to the legend, the swallows immediately fell silent.
I visited the site of the Sermon to the Birds with a Franciscan friar, Guglielmo Spirito, who is also a passionate amateur Tolkien scholar. “Even as a child,” Guglielmo said, “I knew that if I ever joined the Church it would be as a Franciscan. The main thing that attracted me, when I was young, was his relationship with animals. To me the lesson of St. Francis is the same as that of fairy tales: that oneness with nature is not only desirable but possible. He’s an example of wholeness regained, wholeness actually within our reach.” There was no intimation of wholeness at the little shrine, across a busy road from a Vulcangas station, that now commemorates the Sermon to the Birds; I could hear a few crows cawing and tits twittering, but mostly just the roar of passing cars and trucks and farm equipment. Back in Assisi, however, Guglielmo took me to two other Franciscan sites that felt more enchanted. One was the Sacred Hut, the crude stone building in which St. Francis and his first followers had lived in voluntary poverty and invented a brotherhood. The other was the tiny chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, outside which, in the night, as St. Francis lay dying, his sister larks are said to have circled and sung. Both structures are now entirely enclosed by later, larger, more ornate churches; one of the architects, some pragmatic Italian, had seen fit to plant a fat marble column in the middle of the Sacred Hut.
Nobody since Jesus has lived a life more radically in keeping with his gospel than St. Francis did; and St. Francis, unburdened by the weight of being the Messiah, went Jesus one better and extended his gospel to all creation. It seemed to me that if wild birds survive in modern Europe it will be in the manner of those ancient small Franciscan buildings, sheltered by the structures of a vain and powerful Church: as beloved exceptions to its rule. ♦