Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  Although habitat loss is the biggest reason that European bird populations are collapsing, Italian-style hunting (caccia selvaggia, “wild hunting,” its detractors call it) adds particular insult to the injury. When I asked Fulco Pratesi, a former big-game hunter who founded WWF Italy and who now considers hunting “a mania,” why Italian hunters are so wild to kill birds, he cited his countrymen’s love of weapons, their attachment to an “attitude of virility,” their delight in breaking laws, and, strangely, their love of being in nature. “It’s like a rapist who loves women but expresses it in a violent and perverse way,” Pratesi said. “Birds that weigh twenty-two grams are being shot with thirty-two-gram ammunition.” Italians, he added, more easily feel affection for “symbolic” animals like wolves and bears, and have actually done a better job of protecting them than the rest of Europe has. “But birds are invisible,” he said. “We don’t see them, we don’t hear them. In northern Europe, the arrival of migrating birds is visible and audible, and it moves people. Here, people live in cities and large housing complexes, and birds are literally up in the air.”

  For most of its history, Italy was visited every spring and fall by unimaginable numbers of packets of flying protein, and, unlike in northern Europe, where people learned to see the correlation between overharvesting and diminishing returns, supplies seemed limitless in the Mediterranean. A poacher from Reggio di Calabria, still bitter about being forbidden to shoot honey buzzards, said to me, “We were only killing about twenty-five hundred a spring in Reggio, out of a total passage of sixty to a hundred thousand—it wasn’t a big deal.” The only way he could understand the banning of his sport was in terms of money. He told me, in all seriousness, that certain organizations that wanted to tap into state money had set themselves up as antipoachers, and that it was their need for poachers to oppose which had led to the writing of antipoaching laws. “And now these people are getting rich with money from the state,” he explained.

  In one of the southern provinces, I got to know an impishly boyish ex-poacher named Sergio. He’d been well into middle age before giving up poaching, feeling that he’d finally outgrown that stage of life, and he now tells stories of his “sins of youth” for comic effect. Going hunting at night was always illegal but never a problem, Sergio said, if your poaching companions were the parish priest and the brigadier of the local carabinieri. The brigadier was especially helpful in discouraging forest rangers from patrolling in their neighborhood. One night, when Sergio was out hunting with him, they froze a barn owl in the headlights of the brigadier’s jeep. The brigadier told Sergio to shoot it. When Sergio demurred, the brigadier took out a shovel, walked around behind the owl, and whacked it on the head. Then he put it in the rear compartment of the jeep.

  “Why?” I asked Sergio. “Why did he want to kill the owl?”

  “Because we were poaching!”

  At the end of the night, when the brigadier opened the rear compartment, the owl, which had only been stunned, flew up and attacked him—Sergio spread his arms and made a ridiculously ferocious face to show me how.

  For Sergio, the point of poaching had always been eating. He taught me a rhyme in his local dialect which approximately translates: For meat of the feather, eat a crow; for a heart that’s kind, love a crone. “You can cook crow for six days, and it’s still tough,” he told me. “But it’s not bad in a broth. I also ate badger and fox—I ate everything.” The only bird that no Italian seems interested in eating is the seagull. Even the honey buzzard, although southern families traditionally kept one specimen stuffed and mounted in the best room of their house (its local nickname is adorno, for “adornment”), was eaten as a springtime treat; the poacher in Reggio gave me his recipe for fricasseeing it with sugar and vinegar.

  Italian wild hunters who, unlike Sergio, haven’t outgrown the pursuit, and who are frustrated by declining game populations and increasing state restrictions, have learned to go elsewhere in the Mediterranean for a thrill. On the Campanian seacoast, I spoke with a gap-toothed, gleefully unrepentant young-old poacher who, now that he can no longer set up a blind on the beach and shoot unlimited numbers of arriving migrants, contents himself with looking forward to vacations in Albania, where you can still shoot as much as you can find of whatever you want, whenever you want, for a very low fee. Although hunters from all nations go abroad, the Italians are widely considered to be the worst. The wealthiest of them go to Siberia to shoot woodcock during their springtime display flights, or to Egypt, where, I was told, you can hire a local police officer to fetch your kills while you shoot ibises and globally threatened duck species until your arms are tired; there are pictures on the Internet of visiting hunters standing beside meter-high piles of bird carcasses.

  The responsible hunters in Italy hate the wild ones; they hate Franco Orsi. “We have a culture clash in Italy between two visions of hunting,” Massimo Canale, a young hunter in Reggio di Calabria, told me. “One side, Orsi’s side, says, ‘Let’s just open it up.’ On the other side are people with a sense of responsibility for where they live. To become a selective hunter, you need more than just a license. You need to study biology, physics, ballistics. You become selective for boar and deer—you have a role to play.” Canale discovered his predatory instinct as a child, while hunting indiscriminately with his grandfather, and he feels fortunate to have met people who taught him a better way. “I don’t mind not killing something on any given day,” he said, “but killing is the goal, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. I have a conflict between my predatory instinct and my rationality, and my way of trying to tame my instinct is through selective hunting. In my opinion, it’s the only way to hunt in 2010. And Orsi doesn’t know or care about it.”

  The two visions of hunting correspond broadly to Italy’s two faces. There’s the frankly criminal Italy of the Camorra and its allies and the quasi-criminal Italy of Berlusconi’s cronies, but there is also, still, l’Italia che lavora—“the Italy that works [i.e., labors].” The Italians who combat poaching are motivated by disgust with their country’s lawlessness, and they rely heavily on tips from responsible hunters, like Canale, who become frustrated when, for example, they’re unable to find quail to shoot because all the birds have been attracted to illegal recordings. In Salerno, the least disorderly of Campania’s provinces, I joined a squad of WWF guards who took me out to an artificial pond, now drained, where they had recently stalked the president of a regional hunters’ association and caught him illegally using electronic recordings to attract birds. Looming near the pond, amid fields rendered desolate by white plastic crop covers, was a disintegrating mountain of “ecoballs”—shrink-wrapped bales of Neapolitan garbage that had been dumped all over the Campanian countryside and become a symbol of Italy’s environmental crisis. “It was the second time in two years that we’d caught the guy,” the squad leader said. “He was part of the committee that regulates hunting in the region, and he’d remained president in spite of having been charged. There are other regional presidents who do the same thing but are harder to catch.”

  One shining example of the Italy that works has been the suppression of honey-buzzard poaching at the Strait of Messina. Every year since 1985, the national forest police have assigned an extra team with helicopters to patrol the Calabrian side of the Strait. Although the Calabrian situation has lately deteriorated somewhat—this year’s team was smaller than in the past and stayed for fewer days, and the estimated death toll was four hundred, double the number in recent years—the Sicilian side of the Strait is the domain of a famous crusader, Anna Giordano, and remains essentially free of poachers. Beginning as a fifteen-year-old, in 1981, Giordano undertook surveillance of the concrete blinds from which raptors were being shot by the thousands as they sailed in low over the mountains above Messina. Unlike the Calabrians, who ate the buzzards, the Sicilians shot purely for the sake of tradition, for competition with one another, and for trophies. Some of them shot everything; others restricted themselves to ho
ney buzzard (“The Bird,” they called it) unless they saw a real rarity, like golden eagle. Giordano hurried from the blinds to the nearest pay phone, from which she summoned the forest police, and then back to the blinds. Although her cars were vandalized, and although she was constantly threatened and vilified, she was never physically harmed, probably because she was a young woman. (The Italian word for “bird,” uccello, is also slang for “penis” and lent itself to dirty jibes about her, but a poster I saw on the wall of her office flipped these jibes around: “Your Virility? A Dead Bird.”) With increasing success, especially after the advent of cell phones, Giordano compelled the forest police to crack down on the poachers, and her growing fame brought media attention and legions of volunteers. In recent years, her teams have reported seasonal gunshot totals in the single digits.

  “In the early years,” Giordano said when I joined her on a hilltop to look at passing hawks, “we didn’t even dare raise our binoculars when we were counting raptors, because the poachers would watch us and start shooting if they saw us looking at something. Our logs from back then show lots of ‘unidentified raptors.’ And now we can stand up here all afternoon, comparing the markings of first-calendar-year female harriers, and not hear a shot. A couple of years ago, one of the worst poachers, a violent, stupid, vulgar guy who’d always been in our face wherever we went, drove up to me and asked if we could talk. I was, like, ‘Heh-heh-heh-heh, okay.’ He asked me if I remembered what I’d said to him twenty-five years ago. I said I couldn’t remember what I said yesterday. He said, ‘You said the day would come when I would love the birds instead of killing them. I just came up here to tell you you were right. I used to say to my son, when we were going out, “Have you got the gun?” Now I say, “Have you got the binoculars?” ’ And I handed him my own binoculars—to a poacher!—so he could see a honey buzzard that was flying over.”

  Giordano is small, dark, and zealous. She has lately been attacking the local government for failing to regulate housing development around Messina, and, as if to ensure that she has too much to do, she also helps operate a wildlife rescue center. I’d already visited one Italian animal hospital, on the grounds of a shuttered psychiatric hospital in Naples, and seen an X-ray of a hawk heavily dotted with lead shot, several recovering raptors in large cages, and a seagull whose left leg was blackened and shriveled from having stepped in acid. At Giordano’s center, on a hill behind Messina, I watched her feed scraps of raw turkey to a small eagle that had been blinded by a shotgun pellet. She grasped the eagle’s taloned legs in one hand and cradled the bird against her belly. Its tail feathers sadly bedraggled, its gaze stern but impotent, it suffered her to open its bill and stuff in meat until its gullet bulged. The bird seemed to me at once all eagle and no longer an eagle at all. I didn’t know what it was.

  Like most Cypriot restaurants that serve ambelopoulia, the one I went to with a friend and a friend of his (I’ll call them Takis and Demetrios) had a small private dining room in which the little birds could be consumed discreetly. We walked through the main room, in which a TV was blaring one of the Brazilian soap operas that are popular in Cyprus, and sat down to an onslaught of Cypriot specialties: smoked pork, fried cheese, pickled caper twigs, wild asparagus and mushrooms with eggs, wine-soaked sausage, couscous. The proprietor also brought us three fried song thrushes, which we hadn’t asked for, and hovered by our table as if to make sure I ate mine. I thought of Saint Francis, who had set aside his sympathy for animals once a year, on Christmas, and eaten meat. I thought of a kid named Woody, who, on a backpacking trip I’d taken as a teenager, had given me a bite of fried robin. I thought of a prominent Italian conservationist who’d admitted to me that song thrushes are “bloody tasty.” The conservationist was right. The meat was dark and richly flavorful, and the bird was enough bigger than an ambelopoulia that I could think of it as ordinary restaurant food, more or less, and of myself as an ordinary consumer.

  After the proprietor went away, I asked Takis and Demetrios what kind of Cypriots like to eat ambelopoulia.

  “The people who do it a lot,” Demetrios said, “are the same ones who go to cabarets, the lounges where there’s pole dancing and Eastern European girls who make themselves available. In other words, people with not a high level of morality. Which is to say, most Cypriots. There’s a saying here, ‘Whatever you can stuff your mouth with, whatever your ass can grab—’ ”

  “I.e., because life is short,” Takis said.

  “People come to Cyprus and think they’re in a European country, because we belong to the EU,” Demetrios said. “In fact, we’re a Middle Eastern country that’s part of Europe by accident.”

  The night before, at the Paralimni police station, I’d given a statement to a young detective who seemed to want me to say that the attackers of the CABS team had only been trying to get the team to stop taking pictures and video of them. “For people here,” the detective explained when we were done, “it’s a tradition to trap birds, and you can’t change that overnight. Trying to talk to them and explain why it’s wrong is more helpful than the aggressive approach of CABS.” He may have been right, but I’d been hearing the same plea for patience all over the Mediterranean, and it was sounding to me like a version of modern consumerism’s more general plea regarding nature: Just wait until we’ve used up everything, and then you nature lovers can have what’s left.

  While Takis and Demetrios and I waited for the dozen ambelopoulia that were coming, we argued about who was going to eat them. “Maybe I’ll take one small bite,” I said.

  “I don’t even like ambelopoulia,” Takis said.

  “Neither do I,” Demetrios said.

  “Okay,” I said. “How about if I take two and you each take five?”

  They shook their heads.

  Dismayingly soon, the proprietor returned with a plate. In the room’s harsh light, the ambelopoulia looked like a dozen little gleaming yellowish-gray turds. “You’re the first American I’ve ever served,” the proprietor said. “I’ve had lots of Russians, but never an American.” I put one on my plate, and the proprietor told me that eating it was the same as taking two Viagras.

  When we were alone again, my field of vision shrank to a few inches, the way it had when I’d dissected a frog in ninth-grade biology. I made myself eat the two almond-size breast muscles, which were the only obvious meat; the rest was greasy cartilage and entrail and tiny bones. I couldn’t tell whether the meat’s bitterness was real or the product of emotion, the killing of a blackcap’s enchantment. Takis and Demetrios were making short work of their eight birds, taking clean bones from their mouths and exclaiming that ambelopoulia were much better than they remembered; were rather good, in fact. I trashed a second bird and then, feeling somewhat sick, wrapped my remaining two in a paper napkin and put them in my pocket. The proprietor returned and asked if I’d enjoyed the birds.

  “Mm!” I said.

  “If you hadn’t asked for them”—this in a regretful tone—“I think you really would have liked the lamb tonight.”

  I made no reply, but now, as if satisfied by my complicity, the proprietor became talkative: “Young kids today don’t like to eat them. It used to start young, and you’d get used to the taste. My toddler can eat ten at a time.”

  Takis and Demetrios exchanged skeptical glances.

  “It’s a shame they’ve been outlawed,” the proprietor went on, “because they used to be a great tourist attraction. Now it’s become almost like the drug trade. A dozen of them cost me sixty euros. These damned foreigners come and take down the nets and destroy them, and we’ve surrendered to them. Trapping ambelopoulia used to be one of the few ways people around here could make a good living.”

  Outside, by the edge of the restaurant parking lot, near some bushes in which I’d earlier heard ambelopoulia singing, I knelt down and scraped a hole in the dirt with my fingers. The world was feeling especially empty of meaning, and the best I could do to fight this feeling was to unwrap the two dea
d birds from the napkin, put them in the hole, and tamp some dirt down on them. Then Takis led me to a nearby tavern with medium-size birds grilling on charcoal outside. It was a sort of poor man’s cabaret, and as soon as we’d ordered beers at the bar one of the hostesses, a heavy-legged blonde from Moldova, pulled up a stool behind us.

  The blue of the Mediterranean isn’t pretty to me anymore. The clarity of its water, prized by vacationers, is the clarity of a sterile swimming pool. There are few smells on its beaches, and few birds, and its depths are on their way to being empty; much of the fish now consumed in Europe comes illegally, no questions asked, from the ocean west of Africa. I look at the blue and see not a sea but a postcard, paper thin.

  And yet it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the Metamorphoses deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and Saint Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast. For Saint Francis, the crested larks, whose drab brown plumage and peaked head feathers resemble the hooded brown robes of his Friars Minor, his Little Brothers, were a model for his order: wandering, as light as air, and saving up nothing, just gleaning their daily minimum of food, and always singing, singing. He addressed them as his Sister Larks. Once, by the side of an Umbrian road, he preached to the local birds, which are said to have gathered around him quietly and listened with a look of understanding, and then chastised himself for not having thought to preach to them sooner. Another time, when he wanted to preach to human beings, a flock of swallows was chattering noisily, and he said to them, either angrily or politely—the sources are unclear—“Sister Swallows, you’ve had your say. Now be quiet and let me have my say.” According to the legend, the swallows immediately fell silent.