News:
Project of the Month November

Your ongoing support fuels our migratory bird rescue work in Southern Europe!

The bird conservationists of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) and our Foundation need a good dose of civil courage and bravery to stand up to illegal bird poachers and hunters on Cyprus, Sardinia and Sicily. However, our remarkable successes in protecting migratory birds this autumn are a source of motivation and inspiration for the winter bird protection camps, some of which have already begun.

Republic of Cyprus: After days of demonstrations by bird protection teams with placards and live video broadcasts on social media in front of the vast property owned by ‘Akas’ (pseudonym), the largest professional bird poacher on Cyprus, the Cypriot police finally took action and confiscated 15 massive bird nets on his land set up for trapping. Caught red-handed in the act of illegal bird trapping, ‘Akas’ received a hefty fine of over 30,000 euros!

We also caught a second large-scale bird poacher red-handed, whom we call ‘Trikkis’. He had set up 11 illegal bird nets and 270 limesticks on his land, along with electronic bird call devices, and was catching up to 100 songbirds daily. The police, who finally arrived at his property, were able to free 150 songbirds alive, in addition to finding 150 dead birds. ‘Trikkis’ was also charged and fined 30,000 euros.

This is the first time in our 14 years of bird protection camp work in Cyprus that two of the biggest professional bird poachers have been hit with such heavy fines. We now very much hope that, based on our well-founded information, the Cypriot police will take more consistent action against the ‘big players’ in the bird slaughter business in future...

Sardinia (Republic of Italy): Our years of bird protection camps on Sardinia have almost completely eradicated illegal songbird trapping there. True to the motto ‘Prevent new start-ups!’, we continued to fly the flag in the bush-covered mountain landscape around the capital Cagliari – and were able to report three bird poachers and dismantle more than 80 tree and ground snares there last winter. This winter, the Italian Bird Guards want to catch one of the last ‘big players’ in the Sardinian bird trapping business. Last winter, he set up hundreds of traps in a valley near Capoterra, but he has not yet been caught in the act.

Sicily (Republic of Italy): With the effective support of volunteer bird conservationists from the regional nature conservation group ‘Pirati della Marza’, the Bird Guards in our ‘Pantani Cuba & Longarini’ migratory bird sanctuary have the capacity, with the start of the Italian hunting season in December, to sporadically monitor nearby parts of the south-east coast of Sicily at night, even outside our Pantani sanctuary, and to report illegal bird hunting activities.

The quality of our cooperation with the Carabinieri and the financial police was demonstrated when, during an evening truck inspection in the port of Pozzallo, they found thousands of illegally caught songbirds and asked us if they could release them in our protected Pantani migratory bird sanctuary. This shipment of birds would have earned Maltese bird dealers up to €100,000 in profits on the local black market. Never before had the Carabinieri and the financial police on the south-east coast of Sicily delivered such a blow against the international bird-trafficking mafia. Seeing how nearly 2,800 thirsty and hungry European Goldfinches and Greenfinches were freed from their cruelly cramped transport crates and flew back to freedom touched us all deeply.

Please support our bird protection camps so that we can continue to thwart bird poachers and illegal bird hunters this winter.

The three winter bird protection camp missions will cost us up to €19,000.

With your donations, we can work together to save tens of thousands of migratory birds from suffering and a painful death this winter! Thank you for your support!