Killing Of Birds Article In National Geographic

After prying this blackcap from a lime stick, the songbird’s rescuer uses his saliva to remove sticky plum tree sap from its feathers and feet so that it can safely fly when released.

Above photograph was taken by David Guttenfelder/National Geographic (image from July issue of National Geographic magazine)-http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/songbird-migration/guttenfelder-photography

The following is an excerpt from the July issue of national Geographic Magazine  that I thought you might find interesting:

 To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes. Italian hunters and poachers are the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law.

You can read the article from the July 2013 issue of National Geographic Magazine by clicking on the following link: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/songbird-migration/franzen-text

Here is a link to a short but compelling video featuring photographer David Guttenfelder: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/songbird-migration/lime-stick-video