Conservation Note
Ceri Levy on what Malta is actually like
A documentary filmmaker's reaction to seeing the illegal shooting of migrants first-hand, recorded shortly after returning.
“Nothing prepares you for the reality of what’s going on out there. Malta messes with your head.” That was Ceri Levy’s summary, recorded in October 2011 after a visit.
Levy (a documentary filmmaker and writer, and the organiser of the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition) had gone to see the illegal shooting of migrant birds for himself rather than read about it. This conversation was his account of it.
The value of that kind of testimony is specific. The illegal killing of birds in Malta is extensively documented in figures: shots recorded outside legal hours, protected birds shot at, injured birds recovered. Those numbers are what supports enforcement and legal argument, and they are the right basis for policy.
What they do not convey is the experience of standing in a landscape during migration and listening to it. A person arriving from a country where a raptor overhead is an event, into a place where the response is gunfire, is describing something the statistics are not designed to carry, and that gap is why people who go tend to come back with more energy for the issue than people who have only read about it.
BirdLife Malta and the Committee Against Bird Slaughter publish current figures.