Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Even without a tail?” I said.

  “Certainly.” He scooped up the bird and stowed it in an outer pocket of his backpack.

  Blackcaps are one of Europe’s most common warblers and the traditional national delicacy of Cyprus, where they’re known as ambelopoulia. They are the main target of Cypriot trappers, but the bycatch of other species is enormous: rare shrikes, other warblers, larger birds like cuckoos and golden orioles, even small owls and hawks. Stuck in lime in the second orchard were five collared flycatchers, a house sparrow, and a spotted flycatcher (formerly widespread, now becoming rare in much of northern Europe), as well as three more blackcaps. After the team members had sent them on their way, they wrangled about the tally of lime sticks at the site and settled on a figure of fifty-nine.

  A little farther inland, in a dry and weedy grove with a view of the blue sea and the golden arches of a new McDonald’s, we found one active lime stick with one living bird hanging from it. The bird was a thrush nightingale, a gray-plumaged species that I had seen only once before. It was deeply tangled in lime and had broken a wing. “The break is between two bones, so it cannot recover,” Rutigliano said, palpating the joint through feathers. “Unfortunately, we need to kill this bird.”

  It seemed likely that the thrush nightingale had been caught on a stick overlooked by a trapper who had taken down his other sticks that morning. While Heyd and Conlin discussed whether to get up before dawn the next day and try to “ambush” the trapper, Rutigliano stroked the head of the thrush nightingale. “He’s so beautiful,” he said, like a little boy. “I can’t kill him.”

  “What should we do?” Heyd said.

  “Maybe give him a chance to hop around on the ground and die on his own.”

  “I don’t think there’s a good chance for it,” Heyd said.

  Rutigliano put the bird on the ground and watched as it scurried, looking more mouselike than birdlike, under a small thornbush. “Maybe in a few hours he can walk better,” he said, unrealistically.

  “Do you want me to make the decision?” Heyd said.

  Rutigliano, without answering, wandered up the hill and out of sight.

  “Where did it go?” Heyd asked me.

  I pointed at the shrub. Heyd reached into it from two sides, captured the bird, held it gently in his hands, and looked up at me and Conlin. “Are we agreed?” he said, in German.

  I nodded, and with a twist of his wrist he tore the bird’s head off.

  The sun had expanded its reach across the entire sky, killing its blue with whiteness. As we scouted for an approach from which to ambush the grove, it was already hard to say how many hours we’d been walking. Every time we saw a Cypriot in a truck or a field, we had to duck down and backtrack over rocks and pants-piercing thistles, for fear that somebody would alert the owner of the trapping site. There was nothing larger at stake here than a few songbirds, there were no land mines on the hillside, and yet the blazing stillness had a flavor of wartime menace.

  Lime-stick trapping has been traditional and widespread in Cyprus since at least the sixteenth century. Migratory birds were an important seasonal source of protein in the countryside, and older Cypriots today remember being told by their mothers to go out to the garden and catch some dinner. In more recent decades, ambelopoulia became popular with affluent, urbanized Cypriots as a kind of nostalgic treat—you might bring a friend a jar of pickled birds as a house gift, or you might order a platter of them fried in a restaurant for a special occasion. By the mid-nineties, two decades after the country had outlawed all forms of bird trapping, as many as ten million songbirds a year were being killed. To meet the restaurant demand, traditional lime-stick trapping had been augmented by large-scale netting operations, and the Cypriot government, which was trying to clean up its act and win membership in the European Union, cracked down hard on the netters. By 2006, the annual take had fallen to around a million.

  In the past few years, however, with Cyprus now comfortably ensconced in the EU, signs advertising illicit ambelopoulia have begun to reappear in restaurants, and the number of active trapping sites is rising. The Cypriot hunting lobby, which represents the republic’s fifty thousand hunters, is this year supporting two parliamentary proposals to relax antipoaching laws. One would reduce lime-stick use to a misdemeanor; the other would decriminalize the use of electronic recordings to attract birds. Opinion polls show that, while most Cypriots disapprove of bird trapping, most also don’t think it’s a serious issue, and that many enjoy eating ambelopoulia. When the country’s Game Fund organized raids on restaurants serving the birds, the media coverage was roundly negative, leading with an account of food being pulled from the hands of a pregnant female diner.

  “Food is sacred here,” said Martin Hellicar, the campaigns manager of BirdLife Cyprus, a local organization more averse to provocation than CABS is. “I don’t think you’ll ever get someone convicted for eating these things.”

  Hellicar and I had spent a day touring netting sites in the country’s southeast corner. Any small olive grove can be used for netting, but the really big sites are in plantations of acacia, an alien species there’s no reason to irrigate if you’re not trapping birds. We saw these plantations everywhere. Long runners of cheap carpeting are laid down between rows of acacias; hundreds of meters of nearly invisible “mist” nets are strung from poles that are typically anchored in old car tires filled with concrete; and then, in the night, birdsong is played at high volume to lure migrants to rest in the lush acacias. In the morning, at first light, the poachers throw handfuls of pebbles to startle the birds into the nets. (A telltale sign of trapping is a mound of these pebbles dumped by the side of the road.) Since it’s a superstition among poachers that letting birds go free ruins a site, the unmarketable species are torn up and dropped on the ground or left to die in the nets. The marketable birds can fetch up to five euros apiece, and a well-run site can yield a thousand birds or more a day.

  The worst area in Cyprus for poaching is the British military base on Cape Pyla. The British may be the bird-lovingest people in Europe, but the base, which leases its extensive firing ranges to Cypriot farmers, is in a delicate position diplomatically; after one recent enforcement sweep by the army, twenty-two Sovereign Base Area signs were torn down by angry locals. Off the base, enforcement is hampered by logistics and politics. Poachers employ lookouts and night guards and have learned to erect little shacks on their sites, because Game Fund officers are required to get a warrant to search any “domicile,” and in the time it takes to do this the poachers can take down their nets and hide their electronic equipment. Because large-scale poachers are nowadays straight-up criminals, the officers are also afraid of violent attacks. “The biggest problem is that no one in Cyprus, not even the politicians, comes out and says that eating ambelopoulia is wrong,” the director of the Game Fund, Pantelis Hadjigerou, told me. Indeed, the record holder for most ambelopoulia eaten in one sitting (fifty-four) was a popular politician in north Cyprus.

  “Our ideal would be to find a well-known personality to come out and say, ‘I don’t eat ambelopoulia, it’s wrong,’ ” the director of BirdLife Cyprus, Clairie Papazoglou, said to me. “But there’s a little pact here that says that if anything bad happens it has to stay on the island, we can’t look bad to the outside world.”

  “Before Cyprus joined the EU,” Hellicar said, “the trappers said, ‘We’ll pull back for a while.’ Now, for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, there’s a kind of patriotic machismo to poaching. It’s a symbol of resistance to Big Brother EU.”

  What seemed Orwellian to me was Cyprus’s internal politics. It’s been thirty-six years since Turkey occupied the northern part of the island, and the ethnically Greek south has prospered immensely since then, but the national news is still dominated, seven days a week, by the Cyprus Problem. “Every other issue is swept under the carpet, everything else is insignificant,” the Cypriot social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis told me. “They say, ‘Ho
w dare you take us to European Court for something as stupid as birds? We’re taking Turkey to court!’ There was never any serious debate about joining the EU—it was simply the means by which we were going to solve the Cyprus Problem.”

  The European Union’s most powerful instrument of conservation is its landmark Birds Directive, which was issued in 1979 and requires member states to protect all European bird species and preserve sufficient habitat for them. Since joining the EU, in 2004, Cyprus has received repeated warnings from the European Commission for infringement of the directive, but it has so far avoided judgments and fines; if a member state’s environmental laws accord on paper with the directive, the commission is reluctant to interfere with sovereign enforcement.

  Cyprus’s nominally Communist ruling party ardently embraces private development. The tourism ministry is touting plans to build fourteen new residential golf complexes (the island currently has three), even though the country has very limited supplies of fresh water. Anyone who owns land reachable by road can build on it, and, as a result, the countryside is remarkably fragmented. I visited four of the southeast’s most important nature preserves, all of them theoretically due special protection under EU regulations, and was uniformly depressed by their condition. The big seasonal lake at Paralimni, for example, near where I was patrolling with the CABS people, is a noisy dust bowl commandeered for an illegal shooting range and an illegal motocross course, carpeted with shotgun shells, and extensively littered with construction debris, discarded large appliances, and household trash.

  And yet birds still come to Cyprus; they have no choice. Returning to town at some less white-skied hour, the CABS patrol stopped to admire a black-headed bunting, a jewel of gold and black and chestnut, that was singing from the top of a bush. For a moment, our tension abated, and we were all just birdwatchers exclaiming in our native languages. “Ah, che bello!”

  “Fantastic!”

  “Unglaublich schön!”

  Before we quit for the day, Rutigliano wanted to make one last stop, at an orchard where the previous year a CABS volunteer had been roughed up by trappers. As we were turning, in the team’s rental car, off the main highway and up a dirt track, a red four-seater pickup truck was coming down the track, and its driver made a neck-slicing gesture at us. After the truck had moved onto the highway, two of its passengers leaned out of windows to give us the finger.

  Heyd, the sober German, wanted to turn around and leave immediately, but the others argued that there was no reason to think the men were coming back. We proceeded up to the orchard and found it hung with four collared flycatchers and one wood warbler, which, because it couldn’t get airborne, Rutigliano gave to me to put in my backpack. When all the lime sticks had been destroyed, Heyd again, more nervously, suggested that we leave. But there was another grove in the distance which the two Italians wanted to investigate. “I don’t have a bad feeling,” Rutigliano said.

  “There’s an English expression, ‘Don’t press your luck,’ ” Conlin said.

  At that moment, the red pickup sped back into sight, fifty yards down the slope from us, and stopped with a lurch. Three men jumped out and began running toward us, picking up baseball-size rocks and hurling them at us as they ran. I would have guessed that it was easy to dodge a few flying rocks, but it wasn’t so easy, and Conlin and Heyd were hit by them. Rutigliano was shooting video, Mensi was taking pictures, and there was a lot of confused shouting—“Keep shooting, keep shooting!” “Call the police!” “What the hell is the number?” Mindful of the warbler in my backpack, and not eager to be mistaken for a CABS member, I followed Heyd as he retreated up the slope. From a not very safe distance, we stopped and watched two men attacking Mensi, trying to pull his backpack from his shoulders and his camera from his hands. The men, who were in their thirties and deeply suntanned, were shouting, “Why do you do this? Why do you make photos?” Mensi, keening terribly, his muscles bulging, was clutching the camera to his stomach. The men picked him up, threw him down, and fell on him; there ensued a blur of fighting. I couldn’t see Rutigliano but later learned that he was being hit in the face, knocked to the ground, and kicked in the legs and the ribs. His video camera was smashed on a rock; Mensi was also hit in the head with it. Conlin was standing amid the fray with formidable military bearing, holding two cell phones and trying to dial the police. He said to me, later, that he’d told the attackers that he would drag them through every court in the country if they touched him.

  Heyd had continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked, too.

  Running from danger is like no other kind of running—it’s hard to look where you’re going. I jumped a stone fence and dashed through a field full of brambles, found myself stumbling into a ditch and getting hit in the chin by a piece of metal fencing, and decided: That’s enough of that. I was worried about the warbler I was carrying. I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden’s owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I’d blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. “Barbarians!” the daughter translated.

  Back down by the rental car, under clouds threatening rain, Mensi was touching his ribs gently and dabbing at the cuts and abrasions that covered his arms; both his camera and his backpack had been stolen. Conlin showed me the smashed video camera, and Rutigliano, who had lost his glasses and was limping heavily, confessed to me, with matter-of-fact fanaticism, “I wanted something like this to happen. Just not this bad.”

  A second CABS team had arrived and was milling around with grim expressions. In its car was an empty wine carton into which, as a police cruiser was pulling up, I was able to transfer the wood warbler, which was looking subdued but no worse for the wear. I would have felt better about its rescue had there not been, on my cell phone, a new text message from a Cypriot friend of mine, confirming our clandestine date to eat ambelopoulia the following night. I was managing to half convince myself that I could simply be a good journalistic observer and not personally have to eat one; but it wasn’t at all clear how I could avoid it.

  Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean. As its waters are fished clean by trawlers with sonar and efficient nets, its skies are vacuumed clean of migrants by the extremely effective technology of birdsong recordings. Since the 1970s, as a result of the Birds Directive and various other conservation treaties, the situation of some of the most endangered bird species has improved somewhat. But hunters throughout the Mediterranean are now seizing on this marginal improvement and pushing back. Cyprus recently experimented with a spring season on quail and turtledove; Malta, in April, opened its own spring season; and Italy’s parliament, in May, passed a law that extends the fall season there. While Europeans may think of themselves as models of environmental enlightenment—they certainly lecture the United States and China on carbon emissions as if they were—the populations of many resident and migratory birds in Europe have been collapsing alarmingly in the past ten years. You don’t have to be a birdwatcher to miss the calling of the cuckoo, the circling of lapwings over fields, the singing of corn buntings from utility poles. A world of birds already battered by habitat loss and intensive agriculture is being hastened toward extinction by hunters and trappers. Spring in the Old World is liable to fall silent far sooner than in the New.

  The Republic of Malta, which consists of several densely populated chunks of limestone with collectively less than twice the area of the District of Columbia, is the most savagely bird-hostile pl
ace in Europe. There are twelve thousand registered hunters (about three percent of the country’s population), a large number of whom consider it their birthright to shoot any bird unlucky enough to migrate over Malta, regardless of the season or the bird’s protection status. The Maltese shoot bee-eaters, hoopoes, golden orioles, shearwaters, storks, and herons. They stand outside the fences of the international airport and shoot swallows for target practice. They shoot from urban rooftops and from the side of busy roads. They stand in closely spaced cliffside bunkers and mow down flocks of migrating hawks. They shoot endangered raptors, such as lesser spotted eagles and pallid harriers, that governments farther north in Europe are spending millions of euros to conserve. Rarities are stuffed and added to trophy collections; nonrarities are left on the ground or buried under rocks, so as not to incriminate their shooters. When birdwatchers in Italy see a migrant that’s missing a chunk of its wing or its tail, they call it “Maltese plumage.”

  In the 1990s, in the run-up to Malta’s accession to the EU, the government began to enforce an existing law against shooting nongame species, and Malta became a cause célèbre among groups as far-flung as the U.K.’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which sent volunteers to assist with law enforcement. As a result, in the words of a British volunteer I spoke to, “the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious.” But Maltese hunters, who argue that the country is too small for its shooting to make a meaningful dent in European bird populations, fiercely resent what they see as foreign interference in their “tradition.” The national hunters’ organization, the Federazzjoni Kac˙c˙aturi Nassaba Konservazzjonisti, said in its April 2008 newsletter, “FKNK believes that the police’s work should only be done by Maltese police and not by arrogant foreign extremists who think Malta is theirs because it’s in the EU.”