Good Indian Amur falcon news, bad Maltese eagle news

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This video is called Amur falcon‘s epic journey.

From Wildlife Extra:

Amur falcon massacre one year on – No birds killed so far!

Three weeks into the migration – Amur falcons hunted: Zero

October 2013. One year ago, more than 100,000 Amur falcons were killed in Nagaland> in north-east India where they stop over on migration from southern Africa to Mongolia and eastern China. They make this journey, an extraordinary round-trip of some 14,000 miles every year, but it recently became apparent that as many as 100,000 falcons (some estimate even more) were being killed on their migration when they reached Nagaland. Witnesses claimed that tens of thousands of Amur falcons were being trapped and slaughtered every day during their migration.

So far in 2013, more than 300,000 Amur Falcons have arrived in Nagaland on migration. However, thanks to a campaign organised by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), squads of ex-hunters and youths from three villages in the area have been patrolling the falcon roosting areas day and night to ensure they are safe.

Remarkably, the squads have recorded that not a single bird has been killed.

WTI and Natural Nagas started the project to prevent the slaughter of Amur falcons earlier this year, with support from CAF-India in collaboration with Nagaland Forest Department. The Village Council Members of three villages pledged that their respective villages would [stop to] hunt or kill falcons and made it a punishable offence. This was preceded and followed by a number of awareness campaigns and meetings with the villagers.

This video from 2012 is called Thousands of Amur falcon birds poached in Nagaland. I hope that the horrible images of this video will now be history forever.

Unfortunately, not all bird news is as good as this item from India.

This video from Malta says about itself:

12 confirmed shot in Maltese eagle massacre

Thursday 24th October- This morning the confirmed body count of eagles shot down by hunters in Malta and Gozo reached 12, after two more of these rare and highly protected birds of prey were killed in front of watching BirdLife Malta volunteers.

BirdLife Malta’s Conservation Manager, Nicholas Barbara, described the events as a tragic wake-up call:

“We haven’t seen the wanton slaughter of this many protected birds by this many hunters in Malta for a long time. It is difficult to see this as anything other than a complete catastrophe and the descriptions of the scale of killing we have seen in the last 24 hours as an “isolated incident” and the scenario that only a few rogue bad apples are responsible for killing protected birds is not consistent with reality.”

“We can only hope that these events serve as a serious wake-up call to the government that the current enforcement of hunting is not doing the job and things need to change for the situation to improve.”

Read the full story here.

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