This hugely interesting book makes for interesting reading – as long as one takes it in small sips.

Natalino Fenech has long been well-known (apart from his professional other work as a journalist) for his authoritative research on birds in Malta. This is his definitive contribution, a work of scholarship that goes well beyond lists of birds in Malta and details about them.

There is, of course, a large section that lists the birds, many times with photos, that have been registered as having come to Malta at some point or other. But there is a very wide section that speaks about birds in Malta and more about the hunting community, a community with which Prof. Fenech has long had a love-hate relationship, at least from their part.

Many of us maybe do not have any understanding about the basic facts of bird migration that include Malta in their yearly travels. Birds are, perhaps, the real ‘illegal immigrants’ of Malta, have been so for centuries and hopefully will still be there for centuries to come.

Prof. Fenech describes how many birds that land, perhaps for a night or two, in Malta during migration, would be coming from as far as Siberia and perhaps would be traveling on to deep inside Africa. That birds with this pedigree are shot out of the sky is the most sorry aspect of it all. If hunters understand what wonders of nature come in play to bring a bird to Malta they would swap a camera for the gun in their hands.

 In the section dedicated to hunters rather than birds, the author ends on a perhaps premature optimistic note that in time hunting will decrease in Malta. The evidence since the book was written is rather against this optimistic note.

Malta’s geography is what it is, midway between Europe and Africa and, although the main migration routes lie to Malta’s west and east, what is funneled along Italy and uses Malta as a stepping stone on the way to the African heartland, brings all kinds of birds to Malta.

Thus, for instance, Lesser-black Backed Gulls that come to Malta originate from Scandinavia, while Black-headed Gulls come mainly from the Orlov Isles in the Black Sea and Slender-billed Gulls come from Tunisia and the Ukraine. Birds ringed in Malta turn up in countries very far from Malta, and vice-versa. Some even turn up or come from America.

The book is very well-researched and contains over 40 new records of birds in Malta. Very surprisingly, the vast majority of photos of all kinds of birds in Malta were taken by the author himself, and carefully catalogued and annotated.

The author brings to the fore an anthropological bent too, beginning with birds in the Maltese history, from the fossil remains in Ghar Dalam and elsewhere, to birds as portrayed in Roman-times mosaics, to birds as depicted on the old Mdina Cathedral door, to birds as depicted in 17th Century church vestments to birds in Maltese art through the centuries.

Birds are present in coats-of-arms of Maltese and other persons in Malta, and families have nicknames linked to birds, birds figure in placenames, and birds are present in rhyme and songs, and especially in popular sayings mostly concocted by hunters.

The author also gives a substantial account of the history of hunting in Malta. The impression today is that hunting is a traditional pastime, as indeed it is, but the numbers of hunters in the past seems to be rather less than that of today.

Prof. Fenech quotes from a number of records by British hunters in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He also describes in some detail the traditions and skills of Maltese hunters and trappers, including their use of nets and whistles.

Finally, he also delves into the complicated history of bird activists in the past decades. Only a person like the author, and few others, know the intimate details of the troubled relationships between the various bird groups like MOS in the 1970s, and Birdlife today. In many places, I felt the author had arrived at completely different conclusions than BirdLife including on many details of various birds.

Prof. Fenech seems to have concluded his writing in 2010 but history and hunting in Malta have continued after that and, like all history, gives conflicting trends. After the March 2013 election, hunting and trapping have been, to a certain extent, liberalized and the appreciation of birds has been consequently constrained by the conflicts between hunters and bird watchers with the police struggling to keep up.

I would have preferred the details about individual bird breeds to have been first described with details about the appearance in Malta with dates and places (a rather limited information, seeing they are mostly limited to a small range of years. Counting and identifying the birds in the sky is limited to the small amount of bird watchers and what they can see in the places where they monitor. There are cases, and the book sometimes lists them, that when a particular kind of bird is listed as never having been seen in Malta, only then for a specimen to turn up.

Towards the end of the book, when the author quotes birds as mentioned in Maltese proverbs, there are some, I feel, howlers that should have been picked up in a book that is remarkably free of mistakes and blunders. There is, for example, no such saint as ‘Santa Mattija’. Could it be ‘Santa Marija’? In fact, on one and the same page, the feastday is variously listed as 15th August and 24th February.

Maybe some years have elapsed since this book was finished and published but it remains a wonderful sourcebook on the birds of Malta.