Undeterred by EU’s gavel, Maltese trappers hope bird ringing data can save an illegal hobby

Undeterred by an EU Court judgement, trappers want paid bird ringers to document the birds they trap – and release – hoping that data might keep their controversial pastime ‘legal’ for years to come

Photo: BirdLife Malta

Malta’s hunting lobby said it will lobby the government to introduce foreign bird ringers in a bid to provide scientific data on finch populations migrating over the islands, in response to the EU court’s ban on trapping birds.

It is not the first time that the FKNK attempts to attract bird ringers to Malta. The endgame: ring as many finches trapped during the season, in a bid to build as much data as possible to convince the European Commission that Malta has a special case to argue against the Birds Directive’s trapping ban.

It is no easy feat.

In the past years, the government has unsuccessfully attempted to pay EURING ringers from overseas to accompany trappers in Malta to ring the birds they catch and release.

Nobody from the international community of ringers is buying it. Many see this as a smokescreen for trappers, who use clap-nets now ruled illegal by the EU’s Court, to catch more birds, and then flaunt the ringing data in the hope of derogating once again from the ban on trapping.

In the three tenders issued so far by the government, all were eventually cancelled after no offers were received.

While the FKNK claims only BirdLife Malta is licensed to ring birds in Malta – which it does using mist nets, as well as within the bird sanctuaries it manages – the laws actually allow hunters and trappers to become licensed bird ringers under the EURING accreditation network.

But they don’t (and the few that have do not flaunt their new hobby with the rest of the fraternity). After all, the Labour administration since 2014 has persistently derogated from the EU’s ban on bird trapping. But twice the European Court of Justice ordered that these deviations from the law were illegal.

And while the government will not be challenging the European Commission any time soon, its political alliance with the hunting lobby suggests that it will explore new options to audaciously open another trapping season – as soon as 2025, in the last chance saloon of a pre-electoral year.

Scientific data from ringing

The government’s last tender for 10 bird ringers, costing €300,000, was fervently supported by the FKNK. But there were no takers.

If bird trappers can be allowed to catch these birds using clap-nets – which are illegal in the Birds Directive – and then ringed, they hope the scientific data from the ringed birds can provide an elusive “reference population” of the finches migrating over the Maltese islands.

The FKNK argues that its 4,000 trappers are ‘better’ at ringing birds than BirdLife’s few dozen volunteers, because they catch more finches anyway.

The claim stems from the sheer volume of birds caught by the otherwise illegal clap-nets: 16,000 trapped finches caught in 2016 and 2017, the only years for which official data is available.

On the contrary, BirdLife has ringed just 2,683 individual finches over its 44 years of activity, which it does using mist nets.

Crucially however, of these ringed birds only eight have historically been recaptured somewhere else in Europe, such is the paucity of data on these reference populations for migratory birds.

“It stands to reason that the more active these widespread research sites are, the more data will be obtained,” said FKNK director Lino Farrugia last week when announcing the next phase of his lobby’s campaign on trapping.

“Local bird ringers have only ever used a limited number of bird ringers at the same three or four sites,” Farrugia said in a statement that describes trappers as ‘researchers’ – newspeak for the ‘citizen-science’ derogation that has just been ruled illegal by the ECJ.

“The considerable discrepancy in the number of researchers, the extensive network of active trapping sites and their widespread distribution will undoubtedly facilitate wider conservation objectives in the future, as well as providing a more comprehensive understanding of the reference countries of finch populations.”

Farrugia says that when in 2018, Malta was told it could not derogate from the EU’s trapping ban, the ECJ said Malta did not have sufficient scientific evidence on the reference population of finches migrating over the Maltese islands.

In 2020, the Maltese government derogated once again from the ban by introducing a ‘Citizen Science Finch Research Programme’ – a catch-and-release system which environmentalists derided as a cover for all sorts of recreational bird trapping. The FKNK says each catch is checked for a scientific ring; if present, details are recorded and the finch is released, as are birds without scientific rings.

BirdLife CEO Mark Sultana believes the FKNK’s rationale defies a bona fide scientific argument to ring finches trapped on such an expansive scale.

“It looks like they want to pay €300,000 a year for foreign ringers only so that their members can trap as many birds as possible. It’s still a smokescreen, but the smoke’s getting thicker.”

“The point of bird-ringing is that it takes small samples of birds to allow us to learn about a number of facts, including the reference population when they are recaptured – it’s data which truly depends on when and where the bird is recaptured, and it might then  allow us to deduce where these birds’ breeding grounds are.”

But Sultana contests the FKNK’s claim at being effective trappers for ringers.

“The use of clap-nets is illegal anyway, that much was declared in the 2018 decision of the ECJ. But more than that, BirdLife’s ringing activity is squarely aimed towards conservation. Our ringing data is used towards bird conservation, not as a future legal argument in the ECJ to trap birds without releasing. The FKNK simply wants the bird-ringers to justify another derogation from the law.”

Sultana also asks how a larger volume of ringed birds would assist any government bid to defend such a derogation.

“Even had the amount of ringed finches quadruple, you can only build the data for a reference population once these birds are recaptured,” he says – a rare occurrence.

“This does not occur regularly and even when it does, the bird needs to be recaptured during the breeding season in a country where records of breeding of the same species exist. There is no justification to ring thousands of birds to hope for some recaptured specimen during the breeding season to update the reference population.”

Trapping of wild birds

Trapping is banned by the Birds Directive because it is considered an unsustainable method of killing wild birds. Malta still allows a trapping season each and every autumn, by means of a derogation.

Infringement proceedings

In December 2020 the European Commission initiated infringement proceedings against Malta in regard of the derogation allowing trapping of Song Thrush and Golden Plover. They are still ongoing.

The EC argues that that there is poor supervision of the conditions set out in the derogation, which results in other species than those targeted being affected. Relying on insufficient or inaccurate information about the populations of wild birds and the available alternatives, Malta also failed to fulfil the basic conditions for granting such derogation. 

The Wild Birds Regulation Unit (WBRU) lists over 1,360 registered sites with clap-nets for the 2023 trapping season.

Court verdicts

In June 2018, a landmark European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgement  found Malta guilty of infringing the Birds Directive when it allowed finch trapping to reopen between 2014 and 2017.

In spite of the 2018 ECJ finch trapping judgement, in 2020 and yet again in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the government also announced a trapping season for finches under the guise of a research project.

With the excuse that they will be carrying out a scientific study, trappers were once again permitted to trap Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Hawfinch, Chaffinch, Serin, Linnet and Siskin.

Trappers were expected to release the birds soon after they catch them, after recording details of birds carrying a ring and submitting the information to WBRU.

The reopening of the season inevitably led to EC fresh Infringement Proceedings against Malta on finch trapping in December 2020. After the government once again ignored the second formal warning, the Commission referred Malta once again to the ECJ , which in 2024 once again declared that the live capture of finches breaches the Birds Directive.

A total of 2,616 trapping sites were authorised to trap under the finch ‘research’ derogation in 2023.