Rampant indiscriminate killing of Lebanon's birds continues
The shocking image of a dead Cinereous Vulture photographed in Lebanon and shared on social media suggests the indiscriminate killing of birds continues to be rampant across the country.
The shooting of vultures, a practice once common across Europe, that contributed to their widespread decline in the 19th and 20th centuries, is thankfully now a rare occurrence in Europe – although still happening here and there, as we saw with the killing of a Griffon Vulture in Montenegro recently.
The situation is sadly not the same across much of the Middle East where the intense killing of vultures, eagles and other birds for sport continues, as the killing of this visiting Cinereous Vulture illustrates.
Lebanon lies right at the heart of the Eastern Mediterranean Flyway, an important migratory route for birds migrating between Africa and Eurasia, which sees millions of endangered birds pass over the skies of the country, including Egyptian Vultures as well as other raptors such as buzzards, short-toed eagles, kites, honey buzzards and many falcons.
Widespread illegal killing of birds has always been a problem in Lebanon, so much so that a moratorium on hunting of birds was declared in 2004 – on paper, hunting was illegal since then, but the killing did not abate – on the contrary. A 2015 Birdlife International study estimated that 2.6 million birds were shot down in Lebanon each year, which per capita is the second most number of birds shot in the Mediterranean region, after Cyprus. Hunting is considered a tradition passed down the generations, smaller birds are usually cooked and eaten but vultures, raptors and other larger birds are shot just for sport.
In an effort to control the issue Lebanon’s Environment Ministry passed a new hunting law and opened legal hunting again (for the first time in two decades) in 2017. Hunters are now required to apply for licenses to legally hunt in the country, and some 18,000 licenses granted in this first season. However, there were also several reports that hunters were still flaunting the laws such as using electronic bird callers and spinning lures to attract birds and hunting without licenses.
Whilst the problem is being taken seriously within the Lebanon government, with President Michael Aoun personally launching an awareness raising campaign to protect migratory birds, this horrific image of the dead Cinereous Vulture illustrates the enormity of the task facing authorities as they try to enforce the laws on hunting practices.
Here at the Vulture Conservation Foundation we condemn this senseless killing and call on the Lebanese authorities to do more to enforce the laws protecting vultures and other wildlife, including investigating and if at all possible, bringing charges to the individual who killed this protected species,
Cinereous Vultures are extinct as a breeding species in the Middle East, but a small number of individuals migrate through or winter in the region, probably from breeding populations in the Caucasus and western Asia.
The VCF is contributing to a large-scale project addressing illegal bird killing, implemented by Birdlife International, and funded by the MAVA Foundation, that includers a number of actions in Lebanon.
Vulture Conservation Foundation
23 January
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