Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/376810
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2014 20 Y ou can generally tell something sinister is going on when your country's police force starts taking a very keen, almost obsessive, interest in the preservation of wild birdlife… but only when birds are 'threatened' by the efforts of conservationist activists to save their lives. And that sort of thing has been happening quite a lot lately. The most recent case concerns the police interrogation of Ray Vella, a park ranger at Natura 2000, over the transfer of a live flamingo from Paradise Bay to the Ghadira Nature reserve. Vella himself describes this as "intimidation and harassment"; and these are two activities that the park ranger should know a thing or two about. He has so far been shot in the face not once, but twice… and his assailants were never apprehended by the same police who now interrogate him like a suspect for 'handling a protected bird'. But on to the facts of the case. It turns out that the bird in question – a juvenile Greater Flamingo – landed alone at Paradise Bay and was seen wading about by a sizeable number of people. Someone called BirdLife Malta on the (not unreasonable) suspicion that it may have been injured; BLM in turn called Ray Vella, their closest official to the site, who also has a certain experience of this kind of situation. Vella established that the bird was not injured, but had most likely got separated from the rest of the flock. Survival chances for such birds are usually slim, for more reasons than just hunting (fatigue, dehydration, etc). So Vella did what he has done on countless comparable occasions, sometimes at the request of the police themselves (more of this important detail in a sec). He captured the bird and released it at Ghadira, which is a more appropriate habitat for flamingos anyway. This, by the way, is the extent of the 'threat' that the police later acted upon… a 'threat' to this bird's survival, posed by an experienced park ranger who was actually trying to protect it from harm. You could almost stop there and already the situation is intolerably perverse. The autumn hunting season opened last Monday, and there has been the usual barrage of reports of illegal hunting since then. In one case, a man allegedly shot at a flock of little egrets from a boat in Gozo… regardless of the fact that there were people within close proximity to the birds when he pulled the trigger. Naturally I don't expect the police to be immediately at hand to apprehend every culprit within Opinion Raphael Vassallo What the flamingo…? So Vella did what he has done on countless comparable occasions, sometimes at the request of the police themselves – he captured the bird and released it at Ghadira, which is a more appropriate habitat for flamingos anyway