News:
Project of the Month July 2025

Our response to the planned amendment (relaxation) of the Italian hunting law is to purchase more land in Pantani and erect additional protective fencing!

Thanks to the sturdy weir with fish sluice that we built at the mouth of the Pantano Longarini lagoon, where it meets the Mediterranean coast, we can control the water levels of the Pantano Cuba and Longarini lagoons on our land for the benefit of the lagoon wetland and the nearly 120 species of birds that breed there. Even in July, our two lagoons were still full of water. This has enabled the Ferruginous and Marbled Ducks, Common Shelducks, Greater Flamingos, Black-winged Stilts, Terns, wetland birds and songbirds, along with their hundreds of successfully raised young, from having to make an energy-sapping flight and exhausting search for other habitats that still have water.

However, the migratory birds of Europe, which use Italy on their migration route from northern and central Europe to the North African coast and as far as the Mediterranean coast of Sicily, are facing new and serious threats in Italy. Almost 600,000 Italian hunters with hunting licences, and hundreds of thousands more without licences, are already dreaming of being allowed in future to shoot up to 47 bird species instead of only 36, even outside the official hunting season during bird migration, in nature reserves and near the coast. The new hunting law planned by Italy's current Minister of Agriculture would legalise all this! This would set nature and bird conservation in Italy back decades and knowingly consign the current EU Birds Directive to the rubbish bin.

But that's not all: the reopening of trapping facilities is to be legalised, the ban on the construction of new fixed hunting stands is to be lifted, and the breeding of decoy birds for cage trapping is to be permitted. In the future, hunting offences, uncontrolled bird hunting, bird poaching, cruel bird trapping, and keeping birds in cages will be given free rein by law.

Our early response is to purchase more land and continue building protective fences around our Pantani migratory bird sanctuary, because only private, fenced-off, and signposted land will be safe from bird hunters and criminal poachers in Italy in the future!

• At the end of March 2025, we paid the final purchase price instalment of €118,000 for the 10.7-hectare waterfront property on the north side of our Pantani Longarini lagoon, thereby, in December 2024, preventing the encroachment of a solar park on the lagoon shore.
• Also in March, after more than five years of fruitless negotiations, we were able to purchase a 0.7-hectare (7,000 m²) hillside property on the eastern side of the Pantano Cuba lagoon for €24,000, thereby closing another gap in our property portfolio.
• Negotiations for two additional hillside properties on the eastern side of the Pantano Cuba lagoon have been stalled for months. Acquiring these properties would enable us to close further gaps in our portfolio. In competition with another prospective buyer, we lack the funds to meet the current asking price of €75,000 for the total of 2.1 hectares, which would increase our Pantani migratory bird sanctuary to a remarkable 452 hectares (4.52 km²) of land we own.

For this purpose and the urgently needed additional protective fencing along the road above our property, we now need your dedicated project donations more than ever. The planned additional fence length of almost 600 metres alone will cost us up to £8,400, including concrete posts and a lockable gate. This is a necessary and most effective measure against the threat of new bird hunting and trapping, and the increasing littering of our property bordering the roadside.

Please support us with your project donation to purchase the 2.1-hectare riverside property and the fence construction costs. Every euro donated helps!

The more habitat we can save on the south-east coast of Sicily for migratory birds and Mediterranean biodiversity through purchase, the greater and more effective the protective effect will be. Nature, its incredible biodiversity and, in particular, our migratory birds need space and peace and quiet to thrive and survive.