Invoking Islamic tradition to save birds in Lebanon

On a Saturday in November, a small group of boys in matching royal blue shirts, the uniform of the Scouts of Lebanon, gathered beside their “hideout”: a small pine forest on the edge of town. Their mission: Collect as many spent shotgun shells as they could find in the next five minutes.

The task had been assigned to them by two volunteers from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon, a conservation organisation focused on protecting birds.

Hunting is ubiquitous in Lebanon, which has the 11th-highest rate of small-arms ownership in the world. In a show of hands, nine of the scouts had claimed to own a gun. Two, both 12 years old, said they were allowed to hunt, and 10 more said they wished they were. Angelo, 16, was not among them.

“Some say it’s a sport, but it’s not, it’s a waste of time,” he said. There were other things you could be doing with the hours spent waiting for birds, he added.

Mike, 12, agreed: “I say also it’s a waste of time, because I don’t like to kill birds.”

Assad Serhal, a founder of SPNL, is a reformed hunter. That morning in Hammana, Serhal grew upset as he showed a photograph that had been spreading on social media. Recently, a series of nationwide protests had been calling for the resignation of Lebanon’s political leaders. One of the chants often shouted by protesters was, “All of them means all of them.” The photograph showed the words of the chant, in Arabic, written using the carcasses of songbirds killed by hunters. The phrase was also underlined in birds, twice.

Among the society’s top concerns is protecting the 2.5 billion migratory birds that pass over the country twice a year. During those journeys, 2.6 million migratory birds are shot or trapped illegally, according to BirdLife International; SPNL is that organisation’s official partner in Lebanon. As other countries examine why some of their protected birds aren’t returning from migration, Lebanon has come under the spotlight.

Lebanon’s topography is dominated by two long mountain ranges. Various bird migration routes, or flyways, pass through the country; when squeezed between mountains, the routes narrow, forming bottlenecks. The bottlenecks create conditions for satisfying bird-watching, and make it easier for organisations like SPNL to conduct bird counts.

But the bottlenecks also serve hunters. At certain points throughout the country, the narrow flyways funnel birds through elevated vantage points from which hunters can get easy shots.

Two decades ago, Serhal was looking at century-old military maps of Lebanon when he noticed something oddly familiar: areas labelled “hima,” and town names that included the word. In Arabic, hima can mean refuge, protected area, private pasture or homeland; “Humat al-Hima” (Defenders of the Homeland) is Tunisia’s national anthem. Serhal had known vaguely of the idea, but had no idea that hima had existed in Lebanon.

He discovered that the concept dates back more than 1,000 years, with a mention in the Quran. Prophet Muhammad had designated certain areas as hima, which meant they were subject to rules about grazing, hunting or even trade. On Serhal’s maps, it turned out, hima signified communal areas. The word’s appearance gave him an idea: Perhaps he could revive its traditional meaning.

Serhal grew up in Lebanon but studied wildlife management at Oklahoma State University, graduating in 1982, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. His plan was to return and establish a hunting farm in Lebanon. But he abandoned it when, while using binoculars for the first time, he watched as a bobwhite quail hen — a game bird — ushered her chicks from bush to bush.

“That gave me the shock of my life,” he said. His binoculars revealed a different way of viewing nature: “When you go to the field as a hunter with a gun, you don’t see the bird. The minute you flush it, you shoot.”

Watching the bobwhite mother protect her chicks, he thought: “I am a criminal.”

In 1990, Serhal completed a stint at the Brooklyn Zoo and, with Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended, returned home. In 1996, he helped establish the Shouf Biosphere Reserve, Lebanon’s first national park.

But after a few years, he felt the Shouf wasn’t working as well as it should. The American model, of land designated and protected by the government, had angered people in the surrounding villages, who had been free to use the area for as long as anyone could remember, to graze livestock and pick wild herbs.

Serhal thought that, instead, hima might be accepted as a traditional concept; it also would include communities and municipalities in the design of the conservation areas. Hima wouldn’t be just about protecting nature, Serhal said; it would be “nature plus people.” When SPNL helped a community design a local hima, the group suggested additional conservation methods, like banning hunting.

The first hima was established in southern Lebanon in 2004. Today there are 25; they have been given legal status by the government and cover more land than Lebanon’s national parks. Five of the designated hima are also what BirdLife calls “Important Bird Areas,” of which there are 15 in the country. Last year, Serhal was awarded Japan’s Midori Prize for Biodiversity, among the world’s most prestigious awards for conservation work.

Community members who look after conservation areas are known as “homat al hima”: protectors of the hima, like in the Tunisian anthem. The group likes to work with young members of the scouts because they have been “homat” since the beginning, Serhal said — cleaning up, rehabilitating and reforesting conservation areas. They are disciplined, after all, and loving nature is part of their scouts’ promise.

He hopes the children that SPNL teaches about bird-watching, conservation and responsible hunting — collecting your shotgun shells, hunting only during the proper season — will ultimately influence their parents. Perhaps someday Lebanese children will receive their first pair of binoculars instead of their first gun.

“You can’t underestimate the power of binoculars,” Serhal said.

Back at the scouts’ hideout, two volunteers with SPNL gave teams Eagle, Lion, Fox and Pegasus a lesson in the environmental dangers of discarded shells: besides the plastic, which would take years to decompose, lead could leak into the groundwater. The municipality plans to designate the hideout a hima, too. For now, hunting is allowed in the pine forest. The evidence was everywhere. Once the scouts had finished their collecting mission, the shells were counted. The total, picked up in five minutes, was 102.

The Eagles, with 42 shells, won.
 

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