The other day, Birdlife Malta reported that this has been an excellent year for breeding birds. Peregrine Falcons – the bird of Dashiel Hammett’s novel and the Humphrey Bogart film – have nested again in the southern cliffs of Malta. Comino had a species of large owl, and Gozo two pairs of an endearing falcon called a Kestrel. The reserves run by Birdlife are now a nursery for Black-winged Stilts and Little-ringed Plovers, among other birds.
Thirty years ago, this was unthinkable. I first took up birdwatching as a teenager in the late 1980s. I remember people saying how strange it was for an island to be missing its gulls. Not so strange to those of us who cared to look. The only places where gulls, or any bird that was larger than a sparrow, were relatively safe, were the harbours.
With the exception of the Merill (Blue Rock Thrush), to which national status and a reputation as a caged songster had lent a charmed life of sorts, any notion of breeding birds was especially unlikely. Unless you were nocturnal and lived on Filfla, or maybe at Ta’ Ċenċ, large breeding birds were another planet. The first time I spent a night on Filfla with a group led by the legendary Joe Sultana, I was amazed to discover that it was possible for large birds to actually raise their young in a place that was not quite abroad.
I remember other things, too. My notebook for 1989 tells me that one crisp morning in December 1989 found us watching a beautiful Ferruginous Duck at Għadira. It took off a few minutes before nine and was shot down not a hundred paces from the reserve.
On another occasion, a wild swan that was present at the reserve decided to get a bird’s-eye view of the bay. We heard four loud bangs and never saw it again.
Thirty years on, things are unrecognisably different. It is now possible, in Malta of all places, to actually enjoy watching birds without the feeling that the experience will contain disturbing images.
The significance of more and more birds breeding in Malta cannot be overestimated, particularly when they include species that are large and attractive enough to consign to stuffed and glazed lifelessness
Breeding birds are a particularly vigorous vote of confidence. While the egg-and-nest system has worked well enough for birds to still be around millions of years after their dinosaur ancestors disappeared, it also makes them vulnerable. It takes time for nests to be built, eggs to be incubated, and young to fledge. During that time, animals that are otherwise free spirits have to stay put.
The significance of more and more birds breeding in Malta cannot be overestimated, particularly when they include species that are large and attractive enough to consign to stuffed and glazed lifelessness.
The reserves themselves, too, have changed. Originally, the idea was that they would serve as a kind of ornithological laager, a respite from the den of shotgun-wielding iniquity that was the rest of Malta. The best analogy I can think of is the Millennium Chapel in Paceville. Behind the iron curtain (Għadira and Simar are ringed by security fencing and barbed wire), birds were safe. Beyond, they were probably in heaven.
I happen to be writing this in a place that overlooks the Birdlife reserve at Simar. Every morning for the last three weeks or so, up to 10 large white birds known as Little Egrets fly in low to spend the day stalking fish and large insects. They are the same birds, commuting the short distance between the three reserves in the north several times a day. On days when the wonder of it passes me by, I dig out my old notebooks.
Gradually, the fences are rusting into redundancy. Salina, the newest reserve, doesn’t even have any. The rationale of reserves has shifted, from that of last-ditch protection to one of provision of habitat. The Little Egrets are safe enough as they fly over Buġibba, but apartment blocks are not rich in fish and small insects. Nor do many tamarisk trees grow in Qawra.
The reason why Black-winged Stilts and Little-ringed Plovers breed at Għadira, and nowhere else in Malta, is no longer primarily a matter of hunting. If it were, the falcons would not be nesting in the southern cliffs. Rather, it’s simply down to habitat – Għadira was designed, and is managed, to maintain the right kind for these birds to breed.
It’s also why they did not breed in the 1980s and 1990s. Even breeding birds tend to fly sometimes, which is fatal when five hectares of reserve is the only safe place. Every year at Għadira, we would watch the courtship displays of stilts and plovers. Then, when even human tastes could tell that things were going well, we would see the birds no more.
It’s bittersweet, really. At a time when the island has found its missing gulls, when courtship leads to the sight of downy chicks, and Little Egrets can spend the summer in places that are not cliffs shrouded in darkness, the reserves may well rediscover, for different but equally-poignant reasons, their vocation as the only places where nature can exist at all.