Every year, during the Northern Hemisphere spring and autumn, the skies over Lebanon are dotted with millions of birds on their epic migrations. From soaring Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus) to charismatic white storks (Ciconia ciconia), more than 500 species of birds traverse the African-Eurasian flyway, which funnels over Lebanon, as they migrate between their breeding grounds in Europe and their wintering grounds in Africa. “It’s an incredible spectacle,” says seabird biologist Andre Raine, science director at Archipelago Research and Conservation in Hawai‘i. “You can see thousands of storks, huge flocks of eagles, honey-buzzards, sparrowhawks … they’re just coming through in waves and waves and waves.” But this avian spectacle draws in a darker element. As large flocks of migratory birds fly over Lebanon and other countries in the region, they become an easy target for poachers, who fire indiscriminately at them, sometimes killing almost every bird in a single flock. Across the Mediterranean, people shoot dead an estimated 11 million to 36 million birds each year, and in Lebanon, one of the worst countries in the region for bird poaching, that number stands at 2.6 million birds a year. “The scale of it is intense … you have to see it to believe it,” Raine says. “You can go to mountaintops … and it’s just littered with snowdrifts of feathers of raptors, where you’re wading through, sometimes up to your knees, in dead birds.” What’s also harrowing is that many dead birds don’t end up as food on the table,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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