France birds glue traps, Is the contested French tradition of glue-hunting songbirds

 France birds glue traps, Is the contested French tradition of glue-hunting songbirds.

President Emmanuel Macron of France has ordered hunters in his country to stop trapping song birds using glue- this has been an old tradition.

Despite the resistance, conservationists have welcomed the beginning of the end of what they see as a barbaric practice from a bygone era.

This old hunting tradition known as birdliming which has gradually been eradicated across Europe following the EU’s 1979 Birds Directive.

In five departments in the south east, around Marseille and Nice, some 5,000 to 6,000 hunters use glue-covered sticks to trap thrushes and blackbirds in a process they call chasse à la glu.

The songbirds are put in cages and used as “callers” to attract fellow wild birds with their melodic chants, thus providing hunters with easy pickings. At the end of the season the birds are, in theory, released back into the wild.

Last year French hunters were allowed to trap more than 40,000 songbirds in this way. But on Thursday Macron announced that the quota for this year’s shooting season, which begins on 1 September, would be zero.