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She's For The Birds
When Anna-Maria Giordano was 10 years old, she fell in love with birds. She would go to the market in her hometown of Messina, Italy, to buy small, perky finches. Messina is on the island of Sicily, near the toe of boot-shaped Italy. Millions of birds fly over the island each spring on their migration route from Africa to Northern Europe, where they lay their eggs.
Giorgio Marcoaldi/PANDA PHOTO
"I started buying singing birds like goldfinches, serin finches and chaffinches," she says. Giordano also bought a couple of falcons and a little owl. But the birds she brought home from the market never remained in their cages for long. Giordano always set them free.
Sadly, a bird set free in Sicily faces danger in the skies. Italians have a long tradition of shooting storks, honey buzzards, golden orioles, swallows, quail and other birds winging their way north. Although hunting such birds is illegal, the people who shoot protected birds often go unpunished.
A Heroic Career Takes Flight When Giordano was 15, she decided she had to help the birds. First she tried to get forest rangers to enforce the hunting laws. That went nowhere. "They all made fun of me because I was just a girl of 15, and I was trying to tell them what to do."
So she and a friend created their own hunting patrol. They went into the woods every year during the migration period in April and May to look for illegal hunters, who are also called poachers.
The patrol's presence made the poachers angry. Hunters would yell insults at her patrol, which grew to include more and more volunteers. When she was 22, someone set Giordano's car on fire--most likely the poachers. They even mailed her a dead falcon and a note that said, "Your courage will cost you dearly." Giordano was bothered by the threats, but she wasn't about to quit. In fact, the abuse she suffered from the hunters helped get law-enforcement officers on her side. "It made the police understand that poaching wasn't just a joke, and made them start helping us track down the poachers."
With the help of the police, Giordano has made a big improvement for the birds that fly over her home. Before she began her patrol, more than 5,000 protected birds were shot by Sicilian hunters each year. Now the number is closer to 200. Across the strait, on Italy's mainland, the numbers are lower too, she says. "We have worked very hard and have finally had some success," says Giordano. "After years of fighting and discussing this problem and writing articles and letters to the newspapers, we have seen the numbers of hunters and slaughtered birds decline each year."
Keeping the Birds in the Air Today Giordano, 32, is a trained ornithologist (bird scientist) with an advanced degree in natural sciences from the University of Messina. She is trying to raise funds for an International Ornithological Center in Italy. The center would teach kids, researchers and volunteers about bird watching, illegal hunting and environmental protection. It would also house a bird hospital in which injured birds could be treated until their release back into the wild. So far, the Italian government has refused to give her any funds, so she is trying other sources. "Italian political authorities are deaf to environmental problems," she says.
Meanwhile, she works at the World Wildlife Fund (wwf) Center for the Rehabilitation of Injured Birds in Messina. She is director of the wwf's Natural Saltwater Reserve in Paceco, Italy, and she has won many awards for her efforts to protect her feathered friends. But Giordano says her heroic actions are just a natural response to seeing beautiful birds in flight destroyed for sport. "I couldn't be a witness to a slaugh- ter without trying to stop it."
--BY MARTHA PICKERILL. REPORTED BY THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS AND GREG BURKE/ROME
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