Every year, during the Northern Hemisphere spring and autumn, the skies over Lebanon are dotted with millions of birds on their epic migrations. From soaring Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus) to charismatic white storks (Ciconia ciconia), more than 500 species of birds traverse the African-Eurasian flyway, which funnels over Lebanon, as they migrate between their breeding grounds in Europe and their wintering grounds in Africa.

“It’s an incredible spectacle,” says seabird biologist Andre Raine, science director at Archipelago Research and Conservation in Hawai‘i. “You can see thousands of storks, huge flocks of eagles, honey-buzzards, sparrowhawks … they’re just coming through in waves and waves and waves.”

But this avian spectacle draws in a darker element. As large flocks of migratory birds fly over Lebanon and other countries in the region, they become an easy target for poachers, who fire indiscriminately at them, sometimes killing almost every bird in a single flock. Across the Mediterranean, people shoot dead an estimated 11 million to 36 million birds each year, and in Lebanon, one of the worst countries in the region for bird poaching, that number stands at 2.6 million birds a year.

“The scale of it is intense … you have to see it to believe it,” Raine says. “You can go to mountaintops … and it’s just littered with snowdrifts of feathers of raptors, where you’re wading through, sometimes up to your knees, in dead birds.”

What’s also harrowing is that many dead birds don’t end up as food on the table, but instead on social media posts. Poachers delight in sharing their mass slaughter as Instagram reels, TikTok videos and Facebook posts to garner likes, views and digital fame for their ruthlessness.

“There’s a massive element of trophy hunting,” Raine says, adding that poachers often put these dead birds on their cars and take photos to show off their “trophies” on social media. “It’s a macho thing.”

In a recent study published in the journal Oryx, Raine and his colleagues used these “digital trophies” to assess the scale of wildlife crime in Lebanon. Scanning more than 1,800 photos posted on Facebook and Instagram from 2011-2023, they found that 94% of the bird species photographed were illegal to hunt in Lebanon. Poachers also posed with their quarry in nearly half of the photos without any attempt to hide themselves or their crime.

‘Astronomical’ scale of massacre

The researchers identified close to 30,000 birds belonging to 212 species in 1,844 photographs, with nearly 20 birds in each on average. The IUCN Red List identifies 19 of these species as endangered, vulnerable or near threatened globally, and 23 as considered threatened in Europe. Among the protected birds, barn swallows (Hirundo rustica), Eurasian blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) and European bee-eaters (Merops apiaster) were the most-seen birds in poachers’ photos.

A quarter of all the analyzed images had at least one raptor, with the European honey-buzzard (Pernis apivorus) being the most conspicuous. Large soaring birds, such as the white stork, black stork (Ciconia nigra) and the great white pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus) were also commonly seen. Poachers even hunted endangered species such as the Egyptian vulture, steppe eagle (Aquila nipalensis) and great bustard (Otis tarda).

“The most heavily affected raptor species is the honey buzzard, which is also something we witness directly out in the field during our bird protection camps,” study co-author Lloyd Scott, from the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), a German antipoaching NGO that’s been involved in Lebanon since 2013, tells Mongabay by email. He says he finds it “staggering” that 232 images analyzed in the study show 890 dead honey-buzzards — around 18 times the entire U.K. breeding population, which is fewer than 50 pairs.

The common quail (Coturnix coturnix), categorized as near threatened in Europe but legal to hunt in Lebanon since 2017, was the most prevalent bird in photos posted on Facebook and Instagram. The photos showed that most poachers had exceeded their bag limit of 20 birds, or killed the birds during the closed season, or did so before 2017, when all bird hunting was banned across the country. That would make those kills illegal.

While poachers mostly hunted birds, photos also showed “trophies” of 15 mammal species, including protected ones such as the Eurasian badger (Meles meles), Indian porcupine (Hystrix indica), and the near threatened striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena). Almost half of the mammal carcasses were carnivores. In addition, the photos showed carcasses of six reptile species, all of which are illegal to hunt.

The “digital trophies” also captured evidence of other illegal activities, such as the possession of live individuals of protected species, minors wielding shotguns, the use of illegal hunting weapons, bird trapping, and the selling of protected species.

The massive scale of poaching in Lebanon, which doesn’t spare breeding pairs or young birds, also hurts conservation efforts in Europe that cost millions of dollars, Raine says. “These countries are putting their money into the conservation of these species, [but] have no control once those birds leave their borders … so they just get annihilated on the way out.”

The scale of illegal hunting revealed in the study is “just the tip of the iceberg,” Raine says, adding that such killings are happening throughout the migration season across the country. “It’s an astronomical number … It’s a whole bunch of illegal actions that are being used to target a whole bunch of protected species in very large numbers.”

Lack of law enforcement a bottleneck to conservation

Ornithologist Michel Sawan, president of the NGO Lebanese Association for Migratory Birds (LAMB), deals with the issue of mass slaughter in the country firsthand. Every day during the migration season, he’s out chasing hunters away, looking for injured birds they leave behind to die, patrolling with police officers — and sometimes even risking his own life.

“The major problem that we are facing is the poor enforcement of the law,” he says, adding that since there’s no dedicated “environment police” in Lebanon, much of the enforcement falls on the shoulders of the Internal Security Forces (ISF), the national police. Other ministries, he says, are “helpless” unless the ISF enforces the antipoaching laws. Even if they did, he says the fines are so low that they don’t deter the hunters.

“If anyone commits an environmental crime [such as] breaking the law of hunting, the fine is $5; if you want to buy 25 gunshots, they are $9,” says Sawan, who wasn’t involved in the study. “So, this is not good.”

“The hunting law is not worth the paper it’s written on,” adds Scott, alluding to the blatant disregard the poachers have for the law. “To tackle the root of the problem, both education initiatives and stricter enforcement resources are urgently needed within Lebanon.”

Sawan says efforts to get social media platforms such as Meta and TikTok to take down poachers’ posts of their kills have been unsuccessful. “We report all the violations, but they don’t delete the accounts or the video, and this is what encourages [poachers] to post more,” he says. “If Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or other social media companies can control them, I think many of them will stop killing these birds.”

Birds across the world are already in crisis due to habitat loss, illegal capture, poisoning and a host of other factors. Illegal hunting of migratory birds on their flyways adds to this long list of threats they face.

“It’s an international issue,” Raine says. “If you’re interested in bird conservation, and you want to see bird populations increase in Europe, you have to pay attention to what’s happening on the migration routes.”

Banner image: A common kestrel, one of the raptors frequently hunted down by poachers in Lebanon. Image by Etienne Gosse via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

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Citations:

Brochet, A., Van Den Bossche, W., Jones, V. R., Arnardottir, H., Damoc, D., Demko, M., … Butchart, S. H. (2017). Illegal killing and taking of birds in Europe outside the Mediterranean: Assessing the scope and scale of a complex issue. Bird Conservation International, 29(1), 10-40. doi:10.1017/s0959270917000533

Raine, A. F., Gregg, J., Scott, L., Hirschfeld, A., Ramadan-Jaradi, G., & Bamberghi, F. (2025). Digital trophies: Using social media to assess wildlife crime in Lebanon. Oryx, 1-9. doi:10.1017/s0030605324000814

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