The Society of Wildlife Artists

In spring 2012 SWLA member Kim Atkinson took part in the Birdlife Malta Springwatch Camp. Images from the harrowing trip are accompanied here by extracts from her notebook.

See Chris Rose’s post below with links to Chris Packham’s campaign to stop the carnage.

A lot of shooting from close by. A number of men on the slope opposite which is rocky, and has a number of square ​‘hides’ as well as drystone terraces, and piled stones which are stands for bird-traps.

One of the hunters is in a tiny walled enclosure, half a mile away below us. It’s the guy with glasses, combats and baseball cap, a liver and white speckled dog, red 4 track saw him yesterday at the Turtle Dove shoot at Gudja.

He goes off with the dog, casting around for a Quail he shot.

In the drawing, the strong graphite marks represent shots, the sequences of little circles are Quail calls, but these could be from taped decoys. It’s a drawing of the terrain dominated by sound. I did it when it wasn’t my turn to note down gunshot: our job was to enumerate all shots heard as well as other detail, and the data used to match up the hunters’ claimed bag for the duration of the open season with their actual shooting rate, target species and so on. We also called the police in when there were transgressions. One such was a lad who was filmed by one of the volunteers shooting at a Golden Oriole. Even though he admitted to being the subject of the film, in which the Golden Oriole could clearly be seen to be shot at (this one got away), still he denied he ever shot at illegal species, and the police gave him his gun back and he strolled back along the track.

Even among fields and smallholdings, drystone walled red-earth fields and stubbles of red sanfoin and golden daisies, just outside the sizeable town of Gudja, even in such a busy place, the shooting was unfettered and terrible. I got caught right in the middle of it and sank to the base of a wall, marking down on a drawing I had been doing all the shots in that short period. Turtle Doves flew and dodged, never strong fliers, over the Carob trees in a blue sky. Folded and fell onto deep red new plough. There were over 100 shots in half an hour. Hunters passed me and knowing the animosity towards Birdlife and the volunteers I dreaded being asked what I had been doing in the sketchbook. No wonder the organisers were never keen on volunteers wandering at large outside the group ​‘watches’. I regretted, at that moment, having wanted to be left to my own devices for half a day, to try to come to terms with the place outside the tight structure of the Camp.