Just came back from a short macro shoot …
As I arrived at my usual spot, two guys on a scooter were driving around and stopped, one of them started looking in the shrub … As I had just started setting up my gear I heared them coming up to me and as they passed me I could hear a speaker they had mounted and covered on the scooter playing bird calls … they just drove by, turned around (it’s a dead end road) and dissapeared.
During my shoot I could hear several time young birds calling in the shrub but never saw one …
When driving back home, the same two guys were sitting alongside the road, probably waiting until I would be gone …
It’s so frustrating when you know what’s going on and can’t do something about it …
I marked down their license plate # on the road and took a picture, as I didn’t have soemthing to write with me …
Bastards. They do this at this time of year because the baby birds are starting to fledge and out of the nest but still rely on their parents for food. Play the birdcall, the babies come looking for the food. Bingo. Like taking candy off a baby.
There was another bunch of guys in two cars, they were BBQ’ing a little back down the road … are they involved? I don’t know … I never saw that many people hanging out there, and I’ve been there quite many times …
seriously now, it is a shame that such behaviour is tolerated here, but poor regulation of the on-selling of such birds to an uneducated public is as much to blame as the bastard poachers themselves.
many wild birds (hundreds of thousands perhaps) are caught here each year for release in ‘buddhist’ karma rituals. the problem is that the dweebs buying the birds to release A) often release the birds in completely the wrong place, killing them slowly, or displacing other resident birds , B) don’t understand that the bird they are releasing was originally free, and thus their karma total for this particular transaction is actually negative, and C) don’t know that for every bird successfully released, maybe another four or five have died in the trapping, housing and transporting phases of the operation. the same goes for fish, whc are oftne released into the wrong type or temperature of water or the wrong habitat too. fresh water fish don’t like sea water, and vice versa.
(source: my figures come from an article i edited for Tzu Chi trying to limit this practice, but i have no idea where it ended up being published).