BY MATTEO
CIVILLINI 12 MAY 2019
Volunteers
are squaring off against smugglers who traffic thousands of birds a year.
CAGLIARI,
ITALY - As a choir of songbirds creates a melodic soundtrack, 10
anti-poaching activists are hiding out among dense shrubs in the mountains
overlooking this city on the southern Italian island of Sardinia. They’re
hoping to spot an illegal bird trapper who’s known to be active in the area.
“This guy is like a Swiss clock,” says Giovanni Malara, the team’s leader. “He
checks his nets and heads back at exactly the same time every day.”
Moments
later, a turquoise motorbike comes racing down a narrow dirt road. “That’s
him,” Malara exclaims. Now the second part of the operation—finding his bird
traps—begins.
The activists,
members of the Committee
Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), a conservation organisation
that conducts anti-poaching operations, fan out to check the motion-sensor
cameras they’d hidden the day before. They hoped that images from the cameras
would point them to the path used by the alleged poacher to reach his trapping
sites. The activists would then search the ground for clues—footprints, shreds
of fabric—that would lead them to the “mist” nets he’d placed to snag birds in
flight. Typically suspended between two poles, they’re called mist nets because
they’re made of thread so fine that birds don’t see them.
On that
day in February 2019, the CABS team failed to locate the trapping stations. But
two days later, as more clues emerged through their on-the-ground activities,
they found 28 nets. Malara says the evidence was handed over to the local
police, who are continuing the investigation.
