Earlier this week, I received a phone call from a friend of mine while he was out walking his dog at Buskett. He called to tell me that he had just turned a sudden corner among the trees... only to come face to face with an adult purple heron (among the largest of our annual spring migrants, by the way, and arguably the most impressive), which naturally took off at once and flew out over the trees to settle somewhere else.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. So frigging what? Am I going to start writing about any old friend of mine, just because they happen to get excited at the sight of some great big bird? No, of course not. It’s just that... well, this friend of mine was not the only one to see a purple heron this week. I saw one, too. The day after receiving that phone call, in point of fact. The only difference was that I didn’t see mine in the flesh, while walking my dog in Buskett. No. I saw mine in the newspaper... Wednesday’s newspaper, to be precise. And, much like Monty Python’s famous parrot before it, this particular heron was not just purple. It was also dead.
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That’s right, folks. You know the difference: alive, dead, dead, alive, that sort of thing... Well, this one left no doubt as to its true condition. It was very dead indeed, intensely dead, I might add... in fact, it’s difficult to imagine a purple heron looking less alive and on the ball than the one I saw in the papers last Wednesday. It had passed on, it was no more, it had ceased to be, it had shuffled off its mortal coil, kicked the bucket, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. It was, in brief, an EX-PURPLE HERON.
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Meanwhile, if it’s any consolation for being dead, I have to add that it was not alone in that condition. There were other ex-birds in that photograph: one of its smaller grey cousins, for instance, as well as a kestrel and (I think) a marsh harrier or two. Now, apart from being dead, these ex-birds also happen to have another characteristic. They are all examples of species which are “protected” in the Maltese Islands. Actually, the purple heron and the marsh harrier in particular are not just protected species; they are “specially protected”... which, I suppose, makes sense: after all, considering the results, it certainly is a “special” kind of “protection” we are dealing with here.
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And therein lies the real reason for my mentioning that phone call in the first place. For, confronted with this extraordinary coincidence, how could I not put two and two together, and come up with the inevitable answer of 17.253? Two purple herons, one seen Tuesday, one seen Wednesday; one named Peter, one named Paul; one alive, the other dead... well, is it at all possible not to be instantaneously seduced by the notion that the dead heron and the live heron were, at the end of the day, one and the same bird? Separated only by the gulf of eternity, and maybe a couple of lead pellets through the torso?
Well, I’ll tell you all how I came to precisely that conclusion, and after that, if any of you are still awake, you can decide for yourselves.
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OK, it goes like this. I don’t off-hand know the precise quantity of purple herons to annually migrate over Malta, and thereby get to experience our “special protection” first hand. But I do know at least one statistic of direct concern to these fine creatures... and that is the number of licensed hunters, which is somewhere in the region of 12,000.
Another statistic of which I am more or less certain concerns the members of the Administrative Law Enforcement department of Malta’s Police Force... in other words, the unfortunate souls whose job it is to provide the “special protection”... in particular, by monitoring and controlling tha activities of the above-mentioned 12,000 hooliga-... I mean, hunters. How many are there, I hear you ask? The answer is 24. (No, no, that’s not a typing error: I really mean 24... as in, “twenty-four”, or two dozen, or four times six, or half of forty-eight, or around one two-thousandth the number of wardens who regularly patrol the streets on the look-out for illegally parked cars, etc., etc.)
Thus, by means of a simple calculation which even a complete mathematical moron like myself can perform, you can easily conclude that there are two (as in, “2”... or twice four... or one-third of six, etc.) enforcement officers to every 1,000 hunters. Or, to be more mathematically meticulous still, one to every 500.
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Ah, if only things were as simple as that. In practice, however, the equation doesn’t quite work that way. For starters, the figure of 12,000 refers only to licensed hunters. In the absence of any real monitoring, we can only guess that the actual hunting population of Malta is larger – much larger – than that.
Besides, even the figure of 24 ALE officers needs qualification. For these 24 brave men and women do not patrol the land simultaneously; oh, no. They operate on a shift basis... which means that at any given moment (like, right now) there will never be more than 12 ALE officers on duty.
Twelve officers (never any more, and usually less) to monitor, control and bring to book every single law-ignoring hunter in Malta and Gozo. Unless my capacity for mental arithmetic has also joined our friends, the dead herons, that fixes the ratio of hunters to law enforcement officers at a staggering 1,000 to one.
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One thousand to one, ladies and gentlemen. Think about that statistic for a minute. One flipping thousand to one. In terms of ordinary linguistic hyperbole, it is more or less the same expression one would use to describe a practical impossibility. Examples: what are the odds of Malta qualifying for the World Cup in Germany 2006? Or of Britney Spears becoming the next Pope? Or (realistically speaking, now) of the entire Eurovision Schlong contest coming and going, without anybody noticing that our entry is actually a complete and utter rip-off of Celine Dion?
I think you’ll find that the roundish figure of “1,000 to one” fits pretty nicely into each of those cases. By a huge coincidence, it also refers to the precise chances of survival of an adult purple heron as it flies over the Maltese Islands, possibly pausing for a brief rest in Buskett. And, last but not least, “1,000 to one” can also be used to describe the odds, as given by most leading book-keepers, of the present administration of government making any changes to the above status quo: for instance, by increasing the number of ALE officers to something which can reasonably cope with an otherwise impossible job. After all, the present administration of government is still run by the man who signed a deal with the hunters in 1998, promising them that the “the law will not change” and that “even if it does change, it will be to the benefit of the hunters, and not vice-versa”.
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And that, my feathered friends, is what makes me almost certain that the above-mentioned two purple herons were one and the same bird. Or if not, that they shared one and the same fate. Q.E.D.