WHILE John Major鈥檚 government tears itself apart over just how European Britain should be, France is struggling with a more pressing problem posed by Brussels 鈥� how to get round a directive on bird protection so that its hunters can shoot birds for a few extra days a year. France鈥檚 environment minister, Michel Barnier, says changing the directive will be a priority during the country鈥檚 presidency of the European Union, which ends in June. The country鈥檚 1.6 million hunters constitute a formidable political lobby.
Under the directive, hunting must stop once migrating birds begin to flock back to their nesting grounds as far away as northern Siberia. France has always argued that the directive is difficult to interpret and that if it is implemented to the letter hunting of early breeding species such as mallard would all but cease. Had the directive been followed this year, critics say, hunters would have had only two weeks to bag a mallard.
The French have the longest hunting season in Europe. Hunters can shoot 58 species over about 7.5 months compared to an EU average of 28 species over 5.2 months. In almost every country, the season ends on the last day of January. But French law has allowed hunters to shoot some species until the end of February.
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In January 1994, the European Court of Justice ruled that this law violated the European directive. A month later the European Commission, headed at the time by Frenchman Jacques Delors, proposed changes to the directive. Under these changes, the length of the season would alter each year depending on the species, the health of the bird population and when migration started. Some species with healthy populations could be hunted for 20 days after migration began. If the population was less healthy, hunting would be stopped 10 days after the first birds set off.
Critics say the complicated phase-out is just a way to extend the hunting season for France. The chances of hunters misidentifying a species are high, they say, and keeping the hunt open while some birds are nesting would disrupt breeding.
French researchers say there is no scientific justification for the Commission鈥檚 proposal, which they say was framed using data from the French National Hunting Organisation (ONC). The Commission鈥檚 advisers said the proposal would have increased the toll of the most popular quarries by just 1 per cent. But according to Alain Tamisier, an ornithologist with the national research agency, CNRS, in the Camargue: 鈥淭here is no existing biological study capable of measuring the quantitative impact on migrating bird populations of phasing-out [each season鈥檚] hunting.鈥�
Last April, the European Parliament refused to vote on the proposed changes to the directive. But the French government went ahead anyway and passed a law modelled on what the directive would have been like if the proposal had been accepted. One source in Brussels even argues that the French law goes beyond the Commission鈥檚 proposal by extending the season for about 20 species by 20 days.
Lo茂c Marion, a CNRS ornithologist at the University of Rennes, says French scientists have been left out of the entire debate. 鈥淭he largest amount of data is collected by the ONC but is not published,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t is an aberration to hunt at the end of February and they know it.鈥�