Connect with Conservation: Malta bird massacre

Steve Allain, our resident conservationist, turns his attention to the threats to songbirds.

By Steve Allain

Friday, 25th May 2018

If there is one group of birds you have probably noticed declining in the British countryside over the past few years, it is the songbirds. Songbirds are a large group of birds, which, as their name suggests, like to sing, filling the landscapes they inhabit with the beautiful sound of bird songs. There is a number of reasons for their decline in recent times, such as the loss of habitats and the use of pesticides, which has reduced the amount of prey available in an area. One factor which you may not be aware of, however, is that of hunting. Every spring and autumn on the islands of Malta there is a hunt, in which thousands of migrating birds are shot over the Mediterranean islands. This is not the only place where songbirds are at risk: a large number of species have disappeared from the wild in south-east Asia, where birds have been collected to supply the pet trade.

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Thousands of migrating birds killed after flying into gas plant flare

SAINT JOHN, N.B. – A manager at the Canaport liquefied natural gas facility in Saint John says there’s little it can do in the next few weeks to prevent more migrating birds from flying into a flare that’s burning at the plant.

Fraser Forsythe said Thursday the latest estimate is that about 7,500 migrating birds died while the company was burning off excess gas at the facility on Friday and Saturday.

The plant is in the middle of making changes to equipment at the facility to reduce the amount of flaring, Forsythe said, but completion of the project is still several weeks away.

In the meantime, he said the plant cannot compromise safety to prevent birds from being killed again.

“We find ourselves in a dilemma here. The flare system is a safety-release system to ensure we can maintain normal operating pressures in the plant,” he said in a telephone interview.

As the liquefied natural gas boils off, some of it has to be released or it poses a safety risk to the facility, added Forsythe.

“At the moment there’s not a whole lot I can do to resolve it in the short term.”

He said a project to install a high-pressure compressor for the gas has been underway since 2011.

“As we commissioned it we have been flaring,” he said. “Unfortunately for us we’re just a few weeks away from getting that compressor up and operating.”

Forsythe said the plant was originally designed to move large amounts of gas on a continuing basis, but the markets have changed and more of the gas is stored now and shipped during peak demand times.

Continued

Hunter warned of bird massacre

The slaughter embarrassed even the most hard-headed of hunters. More than 800 abandoned duck carcasses that shooters did not bother to pick up. At least 150 endangered ducks killed, many among Australia's rarest. And other dead birds - hawk-like whistling kites and black swans - that look nothing like ducks. 

''It's terrible. It's absolutely disgraceful,'' said one of the state's leading duck-hunting advocates, Rod Drew, about the March shootings at the Box Flat private wetland near Boort, in the state's north-west. 

The public, including everyone in Game Victoria, is disgusted by what happened and we don't condone it in any way. Any suggestion that we, myself included, failed to do our job, I totally refute that. 

But a Fairfax Media investigation can reveal that the shooting spree - the likes of which Victorian authorities have not seen since the early 1990s - could have been prevented. Days before the incident, government officials were tipped off by a concerned hunter with a warning. 

This hunter, acting as an informant, told a Department of Sustainability and Environment official that Box Flat should be watched on the duck season opening weekend. Only a year before, in an incident never reported, trigger-happy shooters had gone to the remote wetland and shot birds indiscriminately. 

The shooters had ''shot the shit out of the joint, shot everything that moved'', the informant told the department. There was talk, the hunter added, that it would happen again.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/animals/hunter-warned-of-bird-massacre-20130512-2jg5r.html#ixzz2TTuykFE8