Hunters have installed hundreds of illegal electronic bird lures to disrupt nocturnal Quail migration over the Mediterranean, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) said today. During night patrols activists of the eNGO located a total of 93 bird callers for quails in the Northern and Western district corresponding to a 2-fold increase compared with the numbers found in the same areas last spring. Most of the installations were found at the western coast and in rural areas with Mgarr valley being the hotspot with a total of 25 devices calling throughout the night.

CABS said the devices produce extremely loud signals which can be heard over a distance of several kilometres and which also attract birds down to the ground, when normally they would only fly by or over Malta. The use of pre-recorded bird calls for hunting is banned all over Europe as it is regarded as a method for the mass-killing of birds which gather around the devices at night and are shot or trapped the next morning.

"The problem is well known to the authorities for many years but still the police and the government have done nothing to clamp down on the rampant use of these machines, especially at night", CABS General Secretary Alexander Heyd said. "To make the situation even worse WBRU and Parliamentary Secretary Roderick Galdes repeatedly stated that the use of bird callers has decreased while in fact the opposite is the case". He referred to a statement from the Parliamentary Secretariat for Agriculture, Fisheries and Animal Rights that the illegal use of bird callers declined by 60% compared to pre-2013 levels, issued on the 19th December 2016. The Secretariat asserted that the number of convictions for this type of offence has dropped accordingly. "The decrease in convictions celebrated by Roderick Galdes and the simultaneous rise in cases observed by our teams proves that enforcement is in fact at an all-time low". The reasons are obvious: No police night patrols and decriminalisation of this type of offence. This is exactly the opposite of strict enforcement which is one of the conditions if a country is derogating from the Birds Directive as Malta did with spring hunting. CABS therefore announced that it will report its findings to the European Commission which is responsible for the implementation of the BD in the member states of the EU.
"Despite claims of night patrols for ALE announced by the Police Commissioner, we have discovered that in fact there is still no ALE night shift to deal with illegal callers and illegal trapping at night. As a result, these crimes are spiraling out of control", stated CABS Wildlife Crime Officer Fiona Burrows.

Static bird caller installation include a loudspeaker, a car battery for power supply, an mp3 which imitates the courtship songs of the Quail and a timer which activates the fake bird calls in the night.