News-Archive: Project of the Month March

The only way to effectively protect migratory birds in Sicily is by:
1. Land purchase | 2. Constant surveillance | 3. Fences

At the start of the project in 2013, many of our friends, project partners and committed donors and sponsors saw our vision for migratory bird protection in the face of endemic and widespread bird hunting as an extreme, if not ideological, challenge. We have been working hard on the extensive expansion of our Pantani migratory bird sanctuary Cuba & Longarini on the southeast coast of Sicily, with undiminished enjoyment and total commitment for eleven long years. With hard work and thanks to loyal and ongoing donor support, we have consistently turned this vision into reality year after year and hectare by hectare.

Thanks to our persistence and your dedicated donations, we have created what is now the largest and most secure private migratory bird sanctuary in the EU-Mediterranean region. As of 31 December 2023, we already own 423 hectares (4,230,000 m² equivalent to 4.23 km²) of the Pantani land area. This includes the two lagoons Pantano Cuba & Pantano Longarini, an approximately 1.8 km long canal system, some 60 hectares of wet meadows and almost 105 hectares of lagoon waterfront properties.

Every spring and autumn, tens of thousands of migratory birds from 146 migratory bird species now find paradisiacal conditions for their vital rest and foraging needs, and increasingly also for safe wintering, under the protection of our Bird Guards!

Regrettably, habitual and illegal bird hunters and poachers still repeatedly attempt to hunt ducks, wading birds, and meadow species such as the Northern Lapwing and European Golden Plover on the remaining individual private waterfront properties on the north side of the Pantano Longarini lagoon. Peace, privacy and safer work for us and our Bird Guards will only be possible when we own all the waterfront properties.

We have been working on this for three years under tremendous pressure and with a great deal of time and effort. Fortunately, our efforts unexpectedly bore fruit in 2023. At the beginning of July 2023, the court in Siracusa, responsible for this part of the Pantani region, informed us of a property auction scheduled at short notice. To our great delight, the auction included one of the waterfront properties of some 6.4 hectares (64,000 m⊃) that we had been coveting.

Thanks to his bidding skills, our lawyer won the auction in our favour on July 11, 2023, with a price bid of 105,000 euros. Although we had to make significant use of our iron project reserves to pay the hammer price to the court in Siracusa promptly, this was the only way we could successfully prevent this area of land, which is so valuable for the further development of our migratory bird sanctuary, from falling into the hands of large Italian agricultural companies. Since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, such concerns have been radically transforming the still relatively small-scale Sicilian farming countryside for use by large agricultural machines, clearing centuries-old groves of olive trees, wild almonds trees and kilometre-long Mediterranean wild shrub hedges.

From 2018, our newly owned Pantano Longarini waterfront property was invisible under polytunnels, beneath which tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkins were intensively grown on a vast scale with the massive use of artificial fertilisers and herbicides.

To create new, larger, and safer stopover and feeding areas for the Northern Lapwing (German Bird of the Year 2024), European Golden Plover and the Meadow Pipits, at least in our Pantani migratory bird sanctuary, we have now made great efforts to dismantle and dispose of the dilapidated vegetable polytunnels, which are many hundreds of metres long. We also had the wholly ruined vegetable plots ploughed three times and removed by hand the old irrigation hoses and rubbish buried there. In December 2023, we sowed over 200 kg of Italian Sweet Clover seeds and other wild herbs to restore soil health and end years of soil erosion damaging the lagoon. They have deep roots, form natural nitrogen in the soil and are nutrient-rich insect flowering plants.

However, only by building a protective fence can the Northern Lapwing and European Golden Plover stopover, feeding, and wintering areas become a first-class migratory bird sanctuary protected against both legal and illegal bird hunting activities.

It is essential to know that Italian hunting law allows hunters to legally hunt birds on other people's unfenced property that is not marked as private and to shoot bird species that are strictly protected in other EU states.

We have already installed an official barrier to our property in Pantano Longarini North and have now received official permission to erect a new length of fencing.

For this reason, we want to start building an approximately five-kilometre-long protective fence on the north side of the Pantano Longarini lagoon in March. It will be located directly behind our property and complement the existing protective fence, approximately seven kilometres long along the southern sides of the two Pantani lagoons.

If we manage to build the fence quickly, we will be able to provide tens of thousands of meadow birds, such as the Northern Lapwing, European Golden Plovers and Meadow Pipits, with an additional almost 24-hectare (240,000 m²) fenced-in stopover and feeding place north of our Pantano Longarini lagoon at the start of spring migration.

As the payment of 105,000 euros for the new property from our iron project reserve in autumn 2023 was necessary, we are asking you for your donation today so that we can cover the total costs of approximately 38,600 euros for 5 km of fence material and construction and to finance the three-time ploughing of the ruined former vegetable cultivation areas and the prompt sowing of wild herb seeds.

Thank you for your solidarity with our Pantani migratory bird protection project, one of the most important stopover and feeding places along the central bird migration route from Northern and Central Europe via Sicily to the North African Mediterranean coast.