Spanish bird massacre
The grim fate of migratory songbirds in Valencia, Spain, has been highlighted by a new video filmed by conservation activists, which also shows police not responding to a call-out.
Conservationists from German charity the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) have put original video footage online showing for the first time the brutal operations of Spanish bird trappers. Countless migrating birds are trapped and killed using modern electronic lures and limesticks in traps called paranys. According to the CABS, some 1.2 million songbirds, including several endangered species, are killed every year in this way.
The scene of these nightly crimes are the paranys, specially cultivated and trimmed trapping gardens that dominate the landscape between Valencia and Tarragona. Each tree is spiked with hundreds of small limesticks that clog the birds’ plumage at the slightest touch and cause them to fall helpless and flightless to the ground. The trapper then ‘harvests’ them at ground level, usually after a long and painful struggle by strangulation.
For the first time ever, CABS volunteers have managed to film the massacre with low-light cameras. “The material demonstrates that thousands of wild birds are cruelly killed and that many protected and endangered species are among the victims”, said CABS President Heinz Schwarze. The video shows thrushes and Blackcaps loudly panicking and fighting for their lives among the corpses of their relatives.
http://youtu.be/wYbE-LyJOpM
Despite a clear EU ban on such practices, the Spanish authorities take no action against these installations, although these are highly visible and are operated openly by their owners. Schwarze continued: “We have informed the police time and again but no one accepts responsibility.”
CABS accuses the local government of active complicity in the massacre, as they tolerate the operation of the installations, hinder game wardens in their monitoring work and protect trappers from prosecution. The wardens are forbidden to work at night, when the installations are active, which rules out any effective form of control. Even when wardens manage to take a case to court the offenders are let off without sanctions. Only last week a trapper was found not guilty by a court in Vignaros because the commonly used brand of bird lime he also used, Il Tordo, was allegedly not capable of trapping protected species.
CABS has announced that it intends to file an official complaint against Spain with the European Commission because of its toleration of mass, non-selective trapping and its killing of protected bird species. In order to put pressure on the Spanish authorities and to urge the authorities to finally take effective action against this breach of European legislation, CABS has started an international protest action.
A prepared email mail text in Spanish (with English translation), addressed to Valencia’s Environment Minister Isabel Bonig Trigueros, is available here.
http://www.komitee.de/en/actions-and-projects/spain/lime-sticks-spain/protest-mail-spain