28 Jun 2018
Nimrod Mifsud, a BirdLife Malta volunteer for over ten years, has shown passion and drive in his efforts to help birds migrating over Malta leave safely without persecution
Nimrod Mifsud, BirdLife Malta's newly nominated Nature's Hero, made headlines in the international press in 2014. With Nimrod's assistance, British naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham was making a documentary on Malta's controversial spring hunting of migrant birds. While Nimrod and the BBC crew were making their way along a public footpath through land claimed for exclusive use by hunters, he was arrested and charged with trespassing, after allegedly being abused and threatened.
He had to wait until the autumn of 2017 before he was cleared of all charges. By then, Nimrod was also well known to visitors to the RSPB's Loch Garten reserve in Scotland, where he spent the summers of 2015 and 2016 as a volunteer warden monitoring the famous Ospreys.
As Nimrod wrote in his blog: “My home is always close to my heart, not least because of the thousands of migrating birds we have passing through every year... The reason I became involved in conservation, and especially bird conservation, was because in Malta I was disgusted by the amount of birds I would see being hunted or poached. This included my first ever sighting of an Osprey, shot just minutes after I first glimpsed it! Thankfully, BirdLife Malta and the RSPB are slowly pushing back the tide of ignorance by improving local communities’ knowledge of, and respect for, the natural world.”
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