Dear friends of nature and animals,

The days are getting longer again and many local migratory birds are preparing for their journey or have already departed. The Committee is also making final preparations for the autumn season - the most important time of the year for us.

Italy: Legalisation of poached decoy birds - Lombardy opens the door to songbird poaching

The right-wing populist and pro-hunting government of the northern Italian region of Lombardy has passed a new law that makes it even easier for hunters to legalise birds illegally caught in the wild with nets or chicks stolen from nests. Until now, skylarks and thrushes that may be used as decoys in songbird hunting, which is still allowed in Italy, had to be marked with closed and non-removable rings. This was to ensure that the approximately 300,000 decoy birds in Lombardy came from offspring. The new law - passed in July - now opens two huge loopholes: On the one hand, hunters are now allowed to remove the closed rings from decoy birds at their own discretion and without a veterinary certificate and replace them with larger, open rings if they think the decoy bird does not tolerate the closed ring. And - almost worse - the rings will be allowed to deviate from the standard size by up to 10%. In other words, the birds will simply be marked with rings that are too big, which one

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