Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/318021
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 25 MAY 2014 14 For such a small country with such a deep-rooted reputation as being immutable and set in its ways, Malta has a habit of constantly surprising you with tales of the utterly unexpected. This week, for instance, Birdlife Malta released a video showing a pair of brooding Yelkouan Shearwaters fighting off a solitary intruder from their subterranean nesting site, somewhere on the cliffs of Majjistral Park. Perhaps it is an indication of precisely how boring this election campaign has been, but I personally found this distraction to be among the most fascinating things I have seen in years. OK I know what you're thinking. Yelker WHAT? Wasn't that a dance floor sensation sung by Mory Kante in the 1990s? But wait, it sounds more like that song by A Tribe Called Quest: "Can I kick it? Yelkouan!" There: one sure-fire way to both memorise the name, and also to start uncontrollably tapping your foot to one of the most irritating tunes in dance music history, played endlessly on a loop in the iPod of your subconscious. But back to the video, in which two Yelkouan shearwaters can be seen taking turns to incubate a single egg: their only offspring of the entire year. Yelkouans, by the way, are rare birds by any standard; Malta possesses one of the largest single colonies in the Mediterranean, and while I don't know the exact population the numbers are certainly not astronomical. Of course, the birds in the video don't actually know any of that. But like most other living things, they approach the responsibility of parenthood for all the world as if they were the only breeding pair left on earth. Given the treatment of birds and other animals by the island's largest and most numerous predator – Man the Destroyer – I would say that is a wise strategy on the Yelkouans' part. But the challenge in the video does not come from humans. It comes from a fellow Yelkouan shearwater who – by accident or design (most likely by accident) – stumbles upon their underground nest, and is greeted by a truly ferocious display of territorial aggression. OK, it's not exactly a charging rhinoceros, or a cheetah at full sprint; but the sight (and especially the sound) of an infuriated pair of Yelkouans, fighting for the survival of their own genetic information in a fiercely competitive world, is nonetheless a spectacle to behold. I for one will certainly think twice before ever disturbing Mama and Papa Yelkouan again in future. I have no doubt the hapless intruder will feel the same way as he preens, defeated, at his peck-wounds. But it is not so much the individual struggle that impresses the viewer; it is the underlying tableau that is also represents. To suddenly discover that the earth one treads upon so thoughtlessly each day also conceals a little- known underworld of rich biodiversity in its own right – a battlefield on which the timeless struggle for survival relentlessly plays itself out on a loop of its own – is a little like unexpectedly striking oil in your own backyard. There I was, marvelling at the sight of polar bears in the Arctic, or reindeer migrating through the untold expanse of the Tundra, on documentaries such as David Attenborough's Life on Earth… only to suddenly realise that the exact same epochal struggles also take place each day, invisibly, just a few metres beneath my own feet. I don't know about you, but armed with this knowledge I find it increasingly difficult to take seriously the ongoing political struggles we are invited to participate in each day ourselves. How can one truly empathise with emotional appeals to help a party win an extra seat in a largely irrelevant European parliament, when one has just witnessed an impassioned, visceral struggle for the very survival of one's entire species in the theatre of life? And this brings me to a second reason why I thought the video was not only intensely fascinating, but also very timely. I couldn't help finding it all vaguely familiar. Opinion Raphael Vassallo Can I kick it? Yelkouan! 25, Air Cargo House, Triq Ìanni Vassallo, Luqa T: +356 2558 4888 E: trucking@cassar-cooper.com Cassar & Cooper have always put their effort into communicating with every customer creating a tailor-made trucking service to meet the ever increasing demand. COMPETITIVE RATES - EFFICIENT - RELIABLE A tailor-made trucking service to meet all demands.