Libanon – 10. 10. 2019 – Autor: Alexander Heyd

Protected songbirds for sale at Beirut International Airport

Packs with frozen migratory blackcaps labelled as "product of Lebanon"

Beirut: As the autumn bird protection camp in Lebanon draws to a close, some of our team members were shocked yesterday to discover more than 1200 blackcap offered for sale as a Lebanese delicacy in the freezer section of ‘Goodies’ grocery store, in the Duty-Free area. A video uploaded to social media shows how the store had stocked around 20 packets, each containing 30 birds and retailing for $35. The labels also show how the migratory birds are a ‘product of Lebanon’. As blackcap are a strictly protected species which may not be legally hunted or trapped in Lebanon, CABS and our Lebanese partners from the Middle Eastern Sustainable Hunting Centre (MESHC) have sent the video to the Ministry of the Environment and asked the Minister to investigate the case further. In the coming months, we will also investigate commercial sale of protected birds in conjunction with Society for Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL) and the Association for Bird Conservation (ABCL).

Contact: Adonis Khatib (phon +9613897443, adonis@sayd-magazine.com) or Axel Hirschfeld (CABS@komitee.de, +49 1794803805)