Certificates for stuffed bird collections are being “laundered” by poachers who smuggle protected species into the island and sell them on the black market, police investigators believe. 

The authorities are investigating a ring of Maltese poachers who are suspected to be behind a series of alleged hunting crimes in Egyptian national parks and nature reserves.

Sources involved in the investigation told Times of Malta that the hunters were believed to be misappropriating certificates issued for local bird collections in the past and using them to legitimise the birds shot down abroad. 

“This is believed to be an organised criminal network of hunters who are taking advantage of a weak system,” one source said.

There are more than 500,000 certificates for stuffed birds that were issued by the authorities in two separate election-eve amnesties in the late 90s and early 2000s.

However, weak inspections to verify these certificates left an opening for poachers looking to legitimise the large birds shot down during their hunting trips to North Africa and the Sahel.

More than 700 dead protected birds were confiscated by the authorities during a raid in Kirkop in August.

One of the men in the group of seven taken in for questioning is believed to be a principal organiser of poaching trips to Egypt in which protected species are often shot down and smuggled into the island.

Maltese poaching trips in Egyptian national parks have in recent years been singled out by authorities there for having a devastating impact on protected species, as well as links to the illegal guns trade and bribery of park officials.

Some of these certificates just say ‘eagle’, when there are so many types

Other Maltese hunters have been caught trying to smuggle in protected birds shot down in countries from Austria to Argentina in South America.

Meanwhile, police sources pointed to the abuse of stuffed bird certificates as a key component of the local racket. 

Official figures obtained by Times of Malta show that annual inspections of stuffed bird collections and their corresponding certificates have nose-dived from 70 in 2015 to just six so far this year. 

The number of stuffed birds inspected has also dropped by a whopping 95 per cent in recent years. While the authorities had reviewed around 9,000 specimens in 2015, this year they checked just over 500. 

And although more than 2,600 stuffed birds were seized by authorities during inspections four years ago, so far this year the authorities have taken possession of only 14. 

“There may very well be a correlation between this slowdown and the abuse of the paperwork by criminals who smuggle protected birds into Malta and then use old certificates to legitimise newly stuffed birds,” a source in Malta’s wildlife protection authorities said.

Since 2013 some 50 hunters have faced court action after inspections found that their stuffed birds and certificates did not match. This number however has steadily declined in recent years, dropping to just two so far this year. 

Law enforcement authorities confiscated more than 10,000 protected birds held illegally in hunters’ collections between the last amnesty in 2003 and 2015.

Where do stuffed birds end up?

The Natural History Museum holds over 7,000 protected birds confiscated in recent years.

Sources said that from 2011 to 2014, the government’s bird experts had identified and tagged around 8,000 stuffed birds in private collections to ensure that newly shot protected birds were not added to the collections or sold illegally.

From 2015 to last year that number had dropped to close to nil, they said.

Asked about the situation, a spokesman for the Environment Ministry said that most of the recorded data had been gathered through amnesties that were issued in 1998 and 2003.

Some 7,384 applications were submitted covering 513,820 stuffed birds.

However, the figure of stuffed birds actually on the island is believed to be some 200,000 higher.

A ‘certificate to keep’ was issued for collections after “due processing” was completed, however inspections carried out to process this data proved difficult over time, the spokesman said.

The fact that the majority of collections inspected either had undeclared birds (illegal possession) or birds that although registered were not present in the collection (illegal disposal) complicated matters, the spokesman said.

“Suffice to note that since the first amnesty in 1998, the officials from the then Environment Protection Department originally responsible for administering these amnesties were only able to issue a comparatively insignificant amount of ‘certificates to keep’ out of all these collections, so much so that the bulk of the pending work was handed over to Wild Birds Regulation Unit in 2013, 15 years after the first amnesty,” the spokesman said.

All inspections of private collections of stuffed birds carried out by WBRU from 2013 were related to cases for which a ‘certificate to keep’ had not yet been issued, he added.

Meanwhile, one police source explained how the certificates could easily be “laundered”.

First off, the certificates issued for the 1998 amnesty were “very vague” and did not specify exactly which species it was referring to. 

“Some of these certificates just say ‘eagle’, when there are so many types,” he said. 

The source went on to add that if a young hunter had inherited a stuffed bird collection, for instance, he could sell the corresponding certificates to poachers keen on using them for newly stuffed birds. 

“This is something we believe has been going on for quite some time,” the source said.