Dear Jerry and Tweeters,

Your Lebanese acquaintance accurately summed up the way birds are viewed in the Middle East: targets for yahoos.

I have watched Arabs and Turks blasting away at Greater Spotted Eagles, Squacco Herons, Rollers, gulls, terns, shorebirds, wagtails, warblers, and on and on. I have watched them shoot perfectly edible ducks, only to leave them floating downstream, to be eaten by crabs or gulls, I suppose. They shoot birds all year long, including the nesting season.

They also use traps and birdlime to catch Turtle Doves. I once read that the number of Turtle Doves trapped each year on one island in the Red Sea was equal to the number of Turtle Doves fledged in all of Germany.

A British friend of mine raced down to Morocco one time to see a tiny flock of the critically endangered Slender-billed Curlews. He barely made it. I forget the number, but as I recall, all but one or two of the birds had been shot by the time he got there. I believe all but one, or indeed all of them, were dead by the time he got back to England.

In my entire four years in the region, I met exactly one Arab birder. I also exchanged a few e-mails a couple of others, one of whom was a biologist. For every Arab or Turkish birder, though, there must be tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who go out and shoot every bird they see. In Syria, for example, they make decorative wall-hangings and table centerpieces out of birds.

Cultural sensitivity be hanged--the way they treat birds in the Middle East is nothing short of barbaric.



Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


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