The ugly side of killing

 

Great Egret. Photo by Māris Strazds

 

It's easy to oppose killing: everyone knows killing is bad. For an ornithologist it should be equally easy to oppose killing of birds. One could poke hunters with a half-eaten chicken leg and cry: "You evil bird-killing bastards!" But when you're an ornithologist you know how much in nature is actually based on killing. Was it Elton John or someone else who said: "Eat or be eaten."? Balance is the key: don't eat so much there will be nothing to eat in the end.

Modern day hunting is not only (but also) about eating. And you know us modern day eaters: we don't feel the balance. To help us out (at least when it comes to birds) there are laws (in EU it's the Birds Directive) that tell us when, how and which birds we are allowed to kill not to disrupt the balance, i.e., not to threaten the populations of birds. But then there is the case of illegal killing...

When talking to my colleagues in BirdLife International, I usually say that illegal killing is a marginal issue in Latvia. Yes, there are cases when birds are killed illegally, sometimes out of ignorance ("Well, it looked like a duck..."), sometimes out of inter-specific competition ("I couldn't let the cormorant eat my fish") and sometimes out of sheer stupidity and feeling of impunity. Although I still couldn't claim that illegal killing of birds in Latvia poses serious threats to bird populations (but there are cases when it does), each of the cases is still frustrating and an indicator of people's attitude towards nature and laws of nature conservation.

Last week I got a call saying that a Great Egret was shot near the town of Cēsis. A local had seen the bird some days before but now the bird was lying dead in the pond after waterfowl hunters had been around. There is no huntable species in Latvia even remotely similar to Great Egret. But when you have a shotgun in your hands and see a big white bird you simply must shoot it. Maybe it is because of the fear of being caught, maybe it's because the interest in bird has been lost after the urge of killing has been satisfied, the dead bird is left where it has fallen. However, in this case thanks to the rapid action of the locals and State Forest Service the poacher is caught and will be punished.



Black Stork female Guste shot in Ukraine. Photo by Maris Strazds

But when thinking about the conservation of the breeding birds of Latvia, you cannot think only about what is going on in this country, as another ugly example clearly shows. Black Stork female Guste was one of the eight young Black Storks that had hatched in Latvia and were to be followed to their wintering areas by satellite transmitters. Guste chose a strange route: in Ukraine she took the long way around the Black Sea. It was a very wrong decision. The signal from the transmitter stopped and days later the bird was found in a situation very similar to the aforementioned Great Egret: the bird was shot and left in reed. I am afraid, however, in this case the guilty will not be caught.

Illegal killing doesn't affect only the black or the white. It doesn't even matter if the bird is big and beautiful, as the ones mentioned before, or small and ugly. I any case it is hard not to get emotional about such cases. Ornithologists and hunters live in an uneasy balance in Europe (there are places, like Malta, where it's downright war). When it is obviously a hunter that has committed the crime, it is hard not resort to the generalisation of "you evil bird-killing bastards". I still trust that the "average hunter" at least in Latvia is a law-abiding citizen, but for the sake of the balance it would greatly help if not only the ornithologists were raging about the cases of illegal killing of birds.