“The sky is full,” says Anna Giordano, “how wonderful!”
A passerby might look up and wonder what she is talking about, seeing only a very big and apparently empty dome, apart from a few small clouds, above the Peloritani mountains in Sicily.
For sure, the same sky offers spectacular views east across the Strait of Messina to Calabria (Italy’s “toe”). Its other horizons are even more breathtaking if you climb high enough here: the Aeolian Islands including the active volcano Stromboli lying north, and its volcanic sister Etna to the south. But a full sky above us? Of what?
To Giordano’s veteran ornithological eye, there is indeed a rich plenitude in the early evening air. Look high and hard with the naked eye, and you will see many specks, barely discernible as crosses, streaming past some sunset-tinted clouds. Look with binoculars, and it becomes clearer that they are big birds of prey, probably buzzards.
I couldn’t have got much further than that with identification, but the raptor specialists around me know them well. Their wings are long, their tails exceptionally long, and their heads protrude distinctively forwards, like a cuckoo’s. These are honey buzzards, dozens of them at a time, moving rapidly through one of the three great migration “bottlenecks” of Europe and the Middle East. (The others are the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosphorus.)
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More than 2,000 of them were counted passing by our group of a dozen local and foreign specialists and enthusiasts on the second day I was there. We also saw a group of marsh harriers in migration, some peregrine falcons and some resident common buzzards. And the day after I left, last May 12th, Giordano sent me a text which said: “River of honey buzzards! Today over 10,000! New record!!! Fantastico!”
These are staggering numbers of birds of prey to any Irish birdwatcher, even though you can find dozens of reintroduced red kites displaying and roosting on single sites here now, especially in Co Wicklow. But we see no mass migrations of large raptors. And while resident common buzzards have increased rapidly here in recent years, honey buzzards are extremely rare vagrant summer visitors.
Giordano’s volunteers photographed poachers’ car number plates. She brought evidence and charges before the police
It’s quite possible, however, that honey buzzards migrating along the Strait of Messina would be equally rare there today, were it not for the courageous campaign begun by Giordano in 1981, when she was only 15 years old.
Already a keen birdwatcher, she had learned that shooting migrating birds, especially raptors and storks, was a very popular tradition in the mountains above her native city of Messina. She climbed Monte Ciccia that April with just one equally young friend, and found to her horror that hunters were slaughtering honey buzzards, and other species, from 17 concrete bunkers, as the birds flew low over the summit ridge. She knew such hunting had been officially banned four years earlier.
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Giordano and her friend were spotted as she retrieved a spent cartridge actually marked, she swears, “honey buzzard” in Italian. They were quickly surrounded by 35 men with shotguns, pistols and knives, who tried in vain to find the cartridge she had hidden in a pocket. They were ominously threatened, then cajoled to “go do some knitting”, and finally released. She says that the sight of a butterfly alighting on another spent cartridge on their way to the road convinced her that “life must win over death”, and that she must launch a campaign to eradicate poaching from her region.
Except for her supportive parents and one close friend who still works with her, everyone in her community told her that hunting raptors “was a tradition I could never change”. But she quickly gained backing from the Italian birding organisation LIPU, and from international groups and individuals. She set up annual camps to protect the migration route, then a little-known one. Her volunteers photographed poachers’ car number plates. She brought evidence and charges before the police.
But, above all, she engaged with the poachers themselves, explaining to them tirelessly that in killing just one bird in spring before the breeding season, there would two to six fewer birds in autumn, and eventually they would become extinct. She is a most persuasive woman, and even made friends and allies of some poachers. Finally her arguments, coupled with increasing interventions from the initially very reluctant police force, and from forest guards deployed at her insistence, won out.
But she concedes that “fear was my daily friend” in those days. Her car was burned out in 1986, and shots were fired at her house. Her anger, and her conviction that she was right, kept her going, she says. The outcome is a story of exceptional conservation success. “In 1984, in only one month of camp, we counted 3,198 raptors and 1,200 shots against them. In 2018, [we counted] 53,629 raptors [over three months] and not one shot.”
Very occasional shooting incidents do still occur (and also on the Calabrian side of the strait, which has its own monitoring and conservation group) but Giordano sees the great danger to the migrating birds today as different but even more challenging: “human activities are everywhere disturbing and destroying habitat.”
The expansion of the Sahara due to climate change poses a great threat to the species migrating from tropical Africa. There is also much habitat degradation closer to home, despite the EU’s designation of both sides of the strait as a Special Protection Area for Birds (SPA). As Giordano notes, migrating birds run very low on energy, and must have appropriate habitat to rest and refuel, especially after crossing a desert and the Mediterranean Sea.
One hubristic proposal in particular has attracted Giordano’s tenacious opposition: the revival of an ancient dream (or nightmare), the construction of a large 3.6km bridge from Messina to Calabria. There is a perfectly good rapid car ferry service already, which also carries trains seamlessly across the strait.
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She believes the bridge is not technically feasible, and certainly violates EU environmental law in an SPA, as it would present a fatal barrier to many exhausted migrants. But the project has strong backing from right-wing parties, and she fears that environmentally destructive bridge-related construction works may get started even while it is under review.
Yet she remains both determined and cautiously optimistic, given her experience: “Honey buzzards, once shot here in thousands, now breed in these mountains. I guess it is a miracle and the sign that some things change for the better. Here, as well as everywhere, it is possible to stop our wrong behaviours.”
For information on participating in Giordano’s monitoring group contact infocampoman@gmail.com – updates (in Italian) are available here.
Honey buzzards and Sicily
Honey buzzards are the chart-topping raptor migrants on both sides of the strait, with 45,806 recorded by Giordani’s group in Sicily between mid-March and May 30th this year, and 34,943 in Calabria by another group in the same period.
The migration route is very challenging: the birds must cross 2,700km of desert, before facing 142km of sea to reach Sicily. So they naturally then make for the Messina crossing, the narrowest point between island and mainland. Many of them will continue deep into eastern Europe and Russia, where they will feed their chicks mainly wasp larvae and honey combs. Their head feathers have a dense scaly structure that protects them from stings.
Some 40 other raptor species have been recorded on the Strait, more than at any other European site. Periodically numerous species include marsh harriers, black kites and red-footed falcons. Great rarities for the region (and sometimes for Europe) have also been spotted, including black vultures and Amur falcons.
Raptors are only part of a much bigger picture, as 327 species, many of them also migrants, have been recorded in the region altogether. White and black storks, and Eurasian cranes, all dramatically large birds, pass through. But there is a multitude of smaller species. Bee-eaters are among the most colourfully visible. The Calabrian group alone recorded 15,000 bee-eaters last spring. And many migrants move at night. In 2006, a radar survey revealed 4.3 million birds coming through the strait nocturnally over five weeks.
All of which makes one wonder why Giordano’s proposal for an international observatory at this exceptionally rich location has not been picked up by any institution.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century
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