Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen

thousand registered hunters (about three percent of the country’s population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird’s protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the side of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; nonrarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, so as not to incriminate their shooters. When birdwatchers in Italy see a migrant that’s missing a chunk of its wing or its tail, they call it “Maltese plumage.”
    In the 1990s, in the run-up to Malta’s accession to the EU, the government began to enforce an existing law against shooting nongame species, and Malta became a cause célèbre among groups as far-flung as the U.K.’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which sent volunteers to assist with law enforcement. As a result, in the words of a British volunteer I spoke to, “the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious.” But Maltese hunters, who argue that the country is too small for its shooting to make a meaningful dent in European bird populations, fiercely resent what they see as foreign interference in their “tradition.” The national hunters’ organization, the Federazzjoni Kac˙c˙aturi Nassaba Konservazzjonisti, said in its April 2008 newsletter, “FKNK believes that the police’s work should only be done by Maltese police and not by arrogant foreign extremists who think Malta is theirs because it’s in the EU.”
    When, in 2006, the local bird group BirdLife Malta hired a Turkish national, Tolga Temuge, a former Greenpeace campaigns director, to launch an aggressive campaign against illegal hunting, hunters were reminded of Malta’s siege by the Turks in 1565 and reacted with explosive rage. The FKNK’s general secretary, Lino Farugia, inveighed against “the Turk” and his “Maltese lackeys,” and there ensued a string of threats and attacks on BirdLife’s property and personnel. A BirdLife member was shot in the face; three cars belonging to BirdLife volunteers were set on fire; and several thousand young trees were uprooted at a reforestation site that hunters resent for its competition with the main island’s only other forest, which they control and shoot roosting birds in. As a widely read hunters’ magazine explained in August 2008, “There is a limit to what extent one can expect to stretch the strong moral ties and values of Maltese families and stop their Latin blood from boiling over and expect them to give up their land and culture in a cowardly retreat.”
    And yet, in contrast to Cyprus, Maltese public opinion is strongly antihunting. Along with banking, tourism is Malta’s main industry, and the newspapers frequently print angry letters from tourists who have been menaced by hunters or have witnessed avian atrocities. The Maltese middle class itself is unhappy that the country’s very limited open space is overrun by trigger-happy hunters who post NO TRESPASSING signs on public land. Unlike BirdLife Cyprus, BirdLife Malta has succeeded in enlisting prominent citizens, including the owner of the Radisson Hotel group, in a media campaign called “Reclaiming YOUR Countryside.”
    Malta is a two-party country, however, and because its national elections are typically decided by a few thousand votes, neither the Labour Party nor the