This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Chris Packham, the naturalist and broadcaster, has been charged with assault and trespass in Malta after confronting hunters he believed had illegally trapped wild birds.

The BBC Springwatch presenter and naturalist will appear before magistrates on Thursday morning on the island of Gozo after being charged with “attempting to use force” and “pushing against” a Maltese man.

Packham, who is making an independent film about Malta’s spring hunt in which thousands of migrating birds are shot over the Mediterranean islands, had called the police after discovering a large cage of protected wild species, including goldfinch, moorhen, starlings and turtle doves. It is illegal to keep some of these birds in captivity.

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According to Packham, he and his producer Ruth Peacey and sound recordist Garry Moore were filming an interview on a public road when two men jumped out of a vehicle and “started screaming and shouting and pushing”.

The police were present and “immediately took the side of the aggressors and manhandled Chris and other members of the team off the site”, according to a statement released via Packham’s agent.

After being detained for more than three hours at a police station, Packham was charged. His production team are believed to have camera footage that may exonerate him.

“It’s intimidation and time-wasting. If they fine me it’s just trying to thwart us,” Packham told the Guardian.

During a Facebook Live Q&A session on Wednesday evening, broadcasting from the Maltese city of Mdina, he went into more detail about the incident that lead to the charges.

“[The man] had some birds in a cage … but by the time the police turned up, they’d all mysteriously vanished. Weird that. And weird that he’d given a list of these birds to police earlier in the day but he wasn’t arrested, and he’s not going to court, I am,” he said, adding that he was due in court at 9am.

In the Facebook Live session, Packham also emphasised that his condemnation of spring hunting didn’t amount to persecution of the Maltese.



“We’ve come out here not as people from the UK wagging their finger at the Maltese, not even as Europeans – seeing as we’re still part of the EU – but just as people who are concerned about the birds,” he said.

Killing birds during the spring breeding season is forbidden under the European Union birds directive but Malta has an opt-out to enable its 10,000 hunters to continue their traditional shoot of migrating birds.



Birds such as the turtle dove – last year added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “red list” of species most at risk of extinction – are illegally hunted. However, this year 15 corpses of protected wild species, including marsh harrier and hoopoe, have also been handed to BirdLife Malta.

The environmental organisation has filmed a hunter illegally shooting a rare stone curlew. Another charity, the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (Cabs), caught two people illegally shooting turtle doves after the end of the spring hunt. Packham said he had also found golden plover held in tiny cages in the hot sun, and these crimes were “obviously the tip of the iceberg”.

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“It’s just bizarre what’s going on,” he said. “What we experienced yesterday BirdLife Malta and Cabs experience all the time. It makes it so difficult to get the law upheld when the local police are very uncooperative because they will be friends of or family of or drinking in the same bar as the people we are trying to incriminate.”

Malta narrowly voted to continue the tradition of spring hunting in a 2015 referendum, and Packham said the government was not doing enough to stop illegal hunting around the still-legal spring shoot.

“The amount of interest and commitment that the government has put into policing these crimes has diminished because there’s an election on the horizon [in Malta] and the government doesn’t want to upset 10,000 hunters and their families,” said Packham.

He called on the EU to take action against Malta. “What’s going on contravenes the European birds directive,” he said. “We want Malta to comply with the birds directive like every other country does.”

The Maltese police said they could not comment on an individual case.