Annually, millions of birds come down into their winter resort in Fereidounkenar and they fall victim to unregulated bird hunting, which hunts them to the point of decimation. According to figures provided by BirdLife International, a global bird watcher, in 2003, 700,000 birds had been hunted. Now, the figure has soared to exceed million.
As one of the greatest winter habitats for birds, Fereidounkenar hosts millions of birds from Europe, Finland and India on their way to Africa; however, they find their silent death in the hands of illegal hunters. Keivan Houshmand, a environmental watchdog told state news agency IRNA on Monday that birds had been in the winter resort for growing their young and they had been hunted cruelly; “the hunters recourse to inhumane methods to hunt these birds; they place air traps, where thousands of birds are entrapped in course of few minutes,” added the watchdog.
Mohammad Ali Allahqoli, the wildlife expert and the head of Parvaz Campaign, told IRNA that in recent years, bird hunters had devised new and totally ‘drastic’ methods this time in Miankaleh, another wetland habitat for migratory birds, moving away from more traditional hunting methods; “Last week, the provincial office of Department of Environment freed thousands of birds from 30 such aerial traps installed by hunters,” he said.
Allahqoli believed that the method was not justified by any ethical or economic motives behind the cruel act; “the method entraps birds which the religion deems as halal, that is, allowed to be eaten, and haram, that is, not allowed to be eaten as food; the method is a mass murder method, which unfortunately, has prevailed for some time in the region; in darker nights, hunters make more profits through hunting more and more hapless birds in their aerial device,” he noted.
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