France bans trapping of songbirds after five-year trial

The tradition of hunting songbirds with glue traps, which bird protection groups have long considered barbaric, is now illegal in France after the country’s highest court of appeal ruled that exemptions allowing the practice to continue infringed EU law.

France was the only country in the EU not to have banned the tradition of glue hunting which is popular with generations of hunters, mainly in the south of France.

Known as “slime hunting”, it involves attracting thrushes and blackbirds to branches covered with a sticky material called bird lime.

The songbirds are then placed in cages and used as “callers” to attract other wild birds with their melodic songs, giving hunters easy choices.

At the end of the season, hunters say the birds are cleaned up and released into the wild.

But bird and animal protection groups say the technique leads to the capture of a wider variety of birds that are often injured, their feathers damaged to the point where they can no longer fend for themselves.

In March, the EU Court of Justice declared that the use of glue traps caused “irreparable damage” to thrushes and blackbirds caught in this way.

The French Council of State confirmed this decision on Monday.

“Neither the government nor the French Federation of Hunters have provided sufficient evidence” that birds other than those targeted did not suffer from the practice, or that they were released without any physical injury, said the Council in its judgment.

“Progress for biodiversity,” tweeted Environment Minister Barbara Pompili who pushed to end the system of exemptions that allowed the practice to continue.

Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, president of the French League for the Protection of Birds, said he was satisfied after five years of battle to put an end to the “practice of yesteryear”.

“It’s over, we are finally turning the page on this unbearably violent, non-selective hunting tradition and we are entering the twenty-first century, which I hope will be more respectful of the environment and of all that lives”, a he declared to RFI.

He acknowledged, however, that there were still other “unacceptable” hunting practices that needed to be banned.

But Eric Camoin, president of the national association in favor of thrush hunting, considered that this decision was “a blow to rurality” and called into question the neutrality of the Council. “He gave in to the lobbying of the Minister of the Environment and the enemies of hunting,” he told France Bleu.

France was the last EU member state to still allow traps, allowing an annual quota of 42,000 birds, mostly in five regions in south-eastern France, though President Emmanuel Macron suspended hunting in last August pending the decision of the EU court.

Two campaign groups, including the French League for the Protection of Birds, had filed a complaint against the French Ministry of the Environment, arguing that the practice amounted to cruelty to animals.

Campaigners say 150,000 birds die each year in France from non-selective hunting techniques like glue traps and nets at a time when the bird population in Europe is in decline.