By Year 9 pupil Lucy
According to the RSPB, more than 800,000 songbirds, blackcaps and garden warblers are estimated to have been illegally killed last autumn on a British military base in Cyprus.
New research that has been conducted by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and BirdLife Cyprus has now identified that a record number of illegal and invisible “mist” nets that have been set up to trap migrating birds. The number of nets discovered on Ministry of Defence land in Cyprus has increased by 183% since the monitoring began in 2002.
The trapping of songbirds for the consumption of human consumption has been practiced for many centuries in Cyprus, but despite the fact that a law in 1974 outlawed the trapping and killing of birds, it is still practiced on an industrial scale. The report has estimated that more than 2.3 million birds, from over 150 species, were killed across the whole of Cyprus last autumn. The birds were served as traditional “ambelopoulia” in many of the island’s restaurants.
The military administration team removed over 50 acres of netting over a period of two years, but were forced to abandon the clearance last autumn, which meant that only seven acres, after trappers organised large protests and a dramatic blockade of the base. Furthermore, the trappers also use electronic calling devices over the base at night to lure the birds.
In response to this problem, scientists in Cyprus have recently developed DNA barcoding database of resident birds and commonly trapped species to enable the correct identification of illegally killed birds, which is hoped to increase the prosecution rates of illegal bird trappers.