Migratory Birds Beware: Detour Europe!

“SMILING like the cat that swallowed the canary, the waiter proudly presents the main course. On a plate, beside a serving of steaming cornmeal, three tiny, blackened beaks point up at the hapless diner. The birds’ grilled bodies are plucked but not gutted. Their charred wings and spindly legs resemble insect appendages. They glisten in fragrant olive oil.”

So began an article in The Wall Street Journal last year. It is a festive, expensive holiday dish served in a restaurant in Italy. The diner usually pops the birds into his mouth whole, crunching bones and all. Only this time it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, the diner, Piergiorgio Candela, an official of Italy’s bird-protection society, prods the three small corpses, trying to identify the species. He concludes: “These birds are illegal.” On one such raid, he found 1,400 plucked robins in the kitchen.

The article continues: “A few species can be killed and sold legally; most can’t. No matter. Each year, 50 million protected robins, larks and other songbirds end up on Italian dinner plates. . . . Altogether, hunting and trapping kill about 15% of migratory birds in the Mediterranean area. In Spain, Catalonian farmers smear twigs with glue to stick birds fast, before pickling them. Near Bergamo, in Italy, trappers blind songbirds to make sweeter-singing house pets. And in Malta, 10% of the 300,000 inhabitants have an annual orgy of shooting, caging and stuffing four million wild birds.”

Migratory songbirds don’t have much to sing about these days. In some regions hardly a peep is heard from them.

[Picture Credit Line on page 31]

G.C. Kelley photo