Watch: Franco Debono – ‘Here’s How I Brought FKNK And BirdLife To The Same Table’
It mightn’t be easy to envisage hunting lobby group FKNK and bird welfare NGO BirdLife Malta working together, but Franco Debono said he had managed to do exactly that.
As a PN MP in the Gonzi administration of 2008-2013, Debono said he racked his brains to come up with an idea on how the two groups could work side by side.
He ended up proposing a project to regenerate the barn owl, which had been driven to local extinction in the 1980s, into the wild.
“Rather than BirdLife and FKNK constantly accusing each other of all sorts of things, I wanted them to work together to help replenish and restore to the wild a species that humans had driven to extinction,” Debono told Lovin Malta.
“Rather than simply focusing on conserving and preserving, I wanted to take it a step further and restore what we had lost.”
Under the last PN administration, Debono was tasked with presiding over a committee to discuss how this project would be implemented. The committee included representatives of FKNK and BirdLife, as well as the-then MEPA (the precursor to the PA and ERA) and Wasteserv,
Debono said they discussed and studied the project in immense detail during weekly meetings at Castille, down to the breed of barn owl that would be most ideal to reintroduce into the wild.
However, Debono said things took a different direction when the PL was elected to government in 2013. BirdLife was shunted out of the project, and FKNK was given complete control.
The project was formally launched in 2018, with barn owls bred in facilities that FKNK constructed at a farmhouse in Buskett.
They were cared for with minimal human interaction until they were able to find for themselves in the wild.
Debono said that, while he is glad the project has been successful, he is disappointed that the spirit of his original proposal was lost along the way.
“My original goal for the project, and I believe that it would have been good for Malta, was to set up a partnership between FKNK and BirdLife,” he said.
“I still hope that this dream will be fulfilled and I urge the government to make it happen – if not with this project, then with other similar ones, because this should have been a pilot project, for other species that went locally extinct.”
Cover photo: Right: (FKNK)
What other species should Malta reintroduce into the wild next?
READ NEXT: Malta’s Foreign Minister Condemns Violence Amid Unprecedented Escalation in Lebanon
