The End of the End of the Earth Page 7

  The easternmost of Europe’s migratory flyways passes through the Balkans, and in Albania the Adriatic coastline, which is otherwise forbiddingly mountainous, opens into an extraordinarily rich system of wetlands, lakes, and coastal plains. For millennia, birds making the northward journey from Africa were able to rest and refuel here before struggling on over the Dinaric Alps to their breeding grounds, and to stop here again in the fall before recrossing the Mediterranean.

  Under the forty-year Marxist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, Albania was an exceptionally repressive police state, its landscape dotted with thousands of mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers facing the country’s sealed borders. Totalitarianism destroyed the fabric of Albanian society and tradition, and yet this was not a bad time for birds. Hoxha reserved the privileges of hunting and private gun ownership for himself and a few trusted cronies. He had a hunting lodge on the coast and spent a week there every year. (To this day, the national Museum of Natural History displays bird trophies of Hoxha and other members of the politburo.) But a handful of hunters had minimal impact on the millions of migrants passing through, and the country’s command-economy backwardness, along with its repellence to foreign beach tourists, ensured that its wealth of coastal habitat remained intact.

  Following Hoxha’s death, in 1985, the country underwent an uneasy transition to a market economy, including a period of near anarchy during which the country’s armories were broken open and the military’s guns were seized by ordinary citizens. Even after the rule of law was restored, Albanians kept their guns, and the country remained understandably averse to regulation of all kinds. The economy began to grow, and one of the ways in which a generation of younger men in Tirana expressed their new freedom and prosperity was to buy expensive shotguns, by the thousands, and use them to do what formerly only the elite could do: kill birds.

  In Tirana, a few weeks after the big February freeze, I met a young woman who was very unhappy with her husband’s new hunting hobby. She told me they’d had a fight about his gun, which he’d had to borrow money to pay for. He kept the gun in their 1986 Mercedes, and she described how she’d once watched him pull over to the side of a road, jump out of the car, and start shooting at little birds on a power line.

  “I’d like to understand this,” I said.

  “You won’t!” she said. “We’ve talked about it, and I don’t understand it.” But she called her husband on her cell phone and asked him to join us.

  “It’s become fashionable, and my friends talked me into it,” the hunter explained to me, somewhat sheepishly. “I’m not a real hunter—you can’t become a hunter at forty. But being a new one, and feeling good about owning a licensed weapon, a very good powerful gun, and never having killed any birds before: it was fun at first. It was like when summer comes and you feel like jumping in the ocean. It was like having the ball at your feet in front of the goal. I would go out on my own and drive up into the hills for an hour. We don’t have well-identified protected areas, and I’d shoot whatever I could. It was spontaneous. But it gets less joyful when you think about the animals you’re killing.”

  “Yes, what about that?” I said.

  The hunter frowned. “I feel very uncomfortable with the situation. My friends are saying it now, too: ‘There are no birds, we walk for hours without seeing any.’ It’s really scary. At this point, I’d be happy if the government put a stop to all hunting for two years—no, five years—to let the birds recover.”

  There would be precedent for a fiat like this: seven years ago, when coastal drug and human smuggling became a problem, the government simply banned most private boats and yachts. But electoral power in Albania is narrowly balanced between two major political parties, each of which is reluctant to impose potentially unpopular regulation on an issue of minor concern to most voters.

  There is, indeed, only one serious bird advocate in Albania, Taulant Bino, who is also the country’s only real birdwatcher. Bino is the deputy minister of the environment, and one morning he took me out to Divjaka-Karavasta National Park, the crown jewel of Albanian coastal preserves, a vast area of outstanding beach and wetland habitat. It was mid-March, a time when hunting is banned throughout the country, and when the park (where hunting is prohibited year-round) ought to have been full of wintering and migrating waterfowl and waders. Except for one pond defended by fishermen, however, and one distant island colony of Dalmatian Pelicans—a majestic and threatened species that Albanians are proud of hosting, although Enver Hoxha did use to shoot them—the park was strikingly devoid of birdlife. There weren’t even any mallards.

  Driving along the beach, we soon saw one reason why: a group of hunters had put out decoys and were shooting cormorants and godwits. The park’s manager, who was escorting us, angrily told the hunters to leave, at which point one of them took out a phone and tried to call a friend in the government. “Are you crazy?” the park manager shouted at him. “Do you realize that I’m here with the deputy minister of the environment?”

  Bino’s ministry has safeguarded, at least on paper, sufficient habitat to sustain healthy populations of migratory and breeding birds. “When conservationists saw that the economic development might hamper the biodiversity,” Bino told me, “they thought they’d better expand the network of protected areas before they were threatened with development. But it’s difficult to control people who are armed—you also need the police. We closed one area here in 2007, and four hundred hunters showed up, shooting everything. The police came in and confiscated some weapons, but after two days they said to us, ‘This is your problem, not ours.’”

  Unfortunately, the old Communist joke still applies to forestry officials responsible for the protected areas: the government pretends to pay them, and they pretend to work. As a result, the laws are not enforced—a fact that Italian hunters, limited by EU regulations at home, were quick to recognize and exploit after Hoxha’s death. During my week in Albania, I didn’t visit a protected area in which there were not Italian hunters, even though the hunting season had ended, even in unprotected areas. In every case, the Italians were using illegal high-quality bird-sound playback equipment and shooting as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted.

  On a second visit to Karavasta, without Bino, I saw two men in camouflage getting into a boat with guns, obviously hurrying to push off before I could speak to them. An Albanian helper of theirs, standing on the beach, told me that they were Albanians, but when I called out to them they shouted back in Italian.

  “Okay, they’re Italians,” the helper admitted as they motored away from us. “Cardiologists from Bari, very well equipped. They were out here from dawn to midnight yesterday.”

  “Do they know the hunting season is over?” I asked.

  “They’re smart men.”

  “How did they get into the national park?”

  “It’s an open gate.”

  “And who gets paid off? The guards?”

  “Not the guards. It’s higher up.”

  “The park manager?”

  The helper shrugged.

  Albania was once ruled by Italy, and many Albanians still view Italians as models of sophistication and modernity. Beyond the very considerable immediate damage that Italian tourist hunters do in Albania, they’ve introduced both an ethic of indiscriminate slaughter and new methods of accomplishing it—in particular the use of playback, which is catastrophically effective in attracting birds. Even in provincial villages, Albanian hunters now have MP3s of duck calls on their cell phones and iPods. Their new sophistication, coupled with an estimated hundred thousand shotguns (in a country of three million) and a glut of other weapons that can be used opportunistically, has turned Albania into a giant sinkhole for eastern European migratory biomass: millions of birds fly in and very few get out alive.

  The smart or lucky ones avoid the country. On a beach in Velipoja, I watched large flocks of ducks fly back and forth in distress, far offshore, further exhausting themselves after crossing the Adria
tic, because local hunters in well-spaced beach blinds prevented them from reaching the wetlands where they could feed. Martin Schneider-Jacoby, a bird specialist for the German organization EuroNatur, described to me how flocks of cranes, approaching Albania from the sea, divide in two by age group. The adult birds continue flying at high altitude while inexperienced first-year birds, seeing attractive habitat below, descend until shots ring out—there’s always somebody ready to take potshots—and then rise again and follow the adults. “They’re coming from the Sahara,” Schneider-Jacoby said, “and they have two-thousand-meter mountains they have to cross. They need the rest. They might still have the energy to get over the mountains, but maybe not then for successful breeding.”

  Across the Albanian border, in Montenegro, Schneider-Jacoby showed me the extensive salt pans at the town of Ulcinj. Until recently, Montenegrin hunters kept the pans as empty of birds as Albania’s “protected” areas, just a few miles away, but a nonprofit, the Center for Protection and Research of Birds of Montenegro, has provided for a single ranger to report poachers to the police, and the results have been dramatic: birds as far as the eye can see, thousands of waders, thousands of ducks, all busily feeding. Spring migration, always awe-inspiring, had never seemed to me more so.

  “Eurasia cannot afford a sinkhole like Albania,” Schneider-Jacoby said. “We’re too good at killing these animals, and we still haven’t learned in Europe how to have a system that will allow birds to survive. Hunting bans are the only thing that seems to work right now. If they stop the hunting here, they’ll have the best habitat in Europe. People will come to Karavasta to see the resting cranes.”

  * * *

  The situation in Albania isn’t hopeless. Many new hunters seem aware that something has to change; better environmental education and the coming growth of foreign tourism may increase demand for unspoiled natural areas; and bird populations will rebound quickly if the government enforces the law in protected areas. When I took the hobbyist hunter and his wife to Karavasta and showed them the ducks and waders at the one defended pond, the wife cried out with pride and happiness: “We didn’t know we had birds like this here!”1

  Farther south, hope is harder to come by. As in Albania, history and politics in Egypt militate against conservation. The country is nominally a signatory to several international conventions regulating bird hunting, but long-standing resentment of European colonialism, exacerbated by tensions over Israel and compounded by the conflict between traditional Muslim culture and the destabilizing freedoms of the West, disincline the Egyptian government to abide by them. What’s more, the Egyptian revolution of 2011 was specifically a repudiation of Egypt’s police. The new president, Mohamed Morsi, can ill afford to enforce regulations overzealously. He presides over a poor (though by no means starving) country of ninety million, into whose national fabric certain key ethnic groups, like the Bedouin, are less than wholly integrated. He has a lot more urgent worries than wildlife.2

  In northeastern Africa, unlike in the Balkans, there is also an ancient, rich, and continuous tradition of harvesting migratory birds of all sizes. (The miraculous provision of meat that saved the Israelites in the Sinai Desert, in the biblical account, is thought to have been migrating quail.) As long as the practice was pursued by traditional methods—handmade nets and lime sticks, small traps made of reeds, camels for transportation—the impact on Eurasian breeding bird populations was perhaps sustainable. The problem now is that new technology has vastly increased the harvest while the tradition remains in place.

  The most hope-confounding cultural disjunction, however, may be this: Egyptian bird hunters make no distinction between catching a fish and catching a bird. (Indeed, in the Nile Delta, they use the same nets for both.) For many Westerners, birds have a charisma, and thus an emotional and even ethical status, that fish do not. In the desert west of Cairo, while sitting in a tent with six young Bedouin bird hunters, I saw a Yellow Wagtail hopping in the sand outside. My reaction was emotional: here was a tiny, confiding, beautifully plumaged animal that had just flown several hundred miles across the desert. The reaction of the hunter next to me was to grab an air rifle and take a shot. For him, when the wagtail fluttered off unharmed, it was as if a fish had got away. For me, it was a rare moment of relief.

  The six Bedouin, barely out of their teens, were camped in a sparse grove of acacias, surrounded in all directions by sand roasting in September sun. They patrolled the grove with a shotgun and air rifles, stopping to flush birds from the acacias by clapping their hands and kicking sand. The grove was a magnet for southbound migrants, and every bird that flew in, regardless of its size or species or conservation status, was killed and eaten. For the young men, songbird hunting was an escape from boredom, an excuse to hang out as a group and do guy things. They also had a generator, a computer loaded with B movies, an SLR camera, night-vision goggles, and a Kalashnikov to fire for fun—they were all from well-to-do families.

  Their morning’s catch, strung on a wire like a large bunch of fish, included turtledoves, golden orioles, and tiny warblers. There’s not much meat on a warbler, or even on an oriole, but to prepare for their long autumnal journey the migrants build up stores of fat, which could be seen in yellow lobes on their bellies when the hunters plucked them. Served with spiced rice, they made a rich lunch. Although orioles are reputed, in the Middle East, to be good for male potency (they’re “natural Viagra,” I was told), I had no use for Viagra and helped myself only to a turtledove.

  After lunch, a hunter came into the tent with the wagtail that I’d seen hopping on the sand. It looked even smaller dead than it had alive. “Poor thing,” another hunter said, to general laughter. He was joking for a Westerner.

  Because Egyptian desert travel is now by truck, rather than camel, practically every decent-size tree or bush, no matter how isolated, can be visited by hunters during the peak fall season. In some areas, golden orioles are a cash crop, sold to middlemen for freezing and resale in the Persian Gulf states. The Bedouin, however, mostly eat what they catch or give it away to friends and neighbors. At prime sites, such as Al Maghrah oasis, where hunters congregate by the dozens, a single hunter can kill more than fifty orioles in one day.

  I visited Al Maghrah late in the season, but the oriole decoys (consisting typically of a dead male on a stick) were still attracting good numbers, and the hunters rarely missed with their shotguns. Given how many hunters there were, it seemed quite possible that five thousand orioles were being taken annually at this one location. And given that there are scores of other desert hunting sites, and that the bird is a prized quarry along the Egyptian coast as well, the losses in Egypt represent a significant fraction of the species’ European population of two or three million breeding pairs. Enjoyment of a colorful species with a vast summer and winter range is thus being monopolized, every September, by a relatively tiny number of well-fed leisure hunters seeking natural Viagra. And while some of them may be using unlicensed weapons to kill orioles, the rest are breaking no Egyptian laws at all.

  At the oasis, I also met a shepherd too poor to own a shotgun. He and his ten-year-old son instead relied on four nets, hung over trees, and they were mostly catching smaller birds like flycatchers, shrikes, and warblers. The son was therefore excited when he managed to corner a male oriole, resplendently gold and black, in a net. He came running back to his father with it—“An oriole!” he shouted proudly—and cut its throat with a knife. Moments later a female oriole flashed close to us, and I wondered if it might be the dead male’s distraught mate. The shepherd boy chased it toward a netted palm tree, but the bird avoided the tree at the last second and headed into the open desert, flying southward. The boy ran after it, cursing: “May your life be ruined!”

  * * *

  Most of the Bedouin I spoke to told me that they won’t kill resident species, such as hoopoes and laughing doves. Like other Mediterranean hunters, however, they consider all migratory species fair game—as the Albanians l
ike to say, “They’re not our birds.” While every Egyptian hunter I met admitted that the number of migrants has been declining in recent years, only a few allowed that overharvesting might be a factor. Some hunters blame climate change; an especially popular theory is that the increasing number of electric lights at the coast is frightening the birds away. (In fact, lights are more likely to attract them.) But the decline occasions only regret, not concern. My Cairene desert guide told me that after the Bedouin had hunted the Houbara Bustard to local extinction—contrary to their professed policy of leaving resident birds alone—they were genuinely sorry it was gone. “It’s not that they don’t care,” he said. “But if the bustard comes back here again, they’ll hunt it again.”

  Environmental advocacy and education in Egypt are mostly confined to a few small nongovernmental organizations, such as Nature Conservation Egypt (which provided assistance with this story). European bird-advocacy groups expend significant money and manpower on Malta and in other European hot spots for migratory bird killing, but the problem in Egypt, which is more severe than anywhere in Europe, is largely overlooked. This represents, perhaps, the inverse of “They’re not our birds”: They’re not our hunters. But the political and cultural divide between the West and the Middle East is also daunting. The basic message of environmental “education” is, unavoidably, that Egyptians should stop doing what they’ve always done; and the concerns of a bird-smitten nation like Britain, whose colonization of Egypt is in any case still resented, seem as absurd and meddling as a Royal Society for the Protection of Catfish would seem to rural Mississippians.