PENN
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In world conservation terms, the most significant casualties of this trade are the raptors. The appearance in Hong Kong shops of single rarer species tigers or leopards say would seem almost unimportant beside the volume of eagles and owls.
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Since 1970, as we've said, the import of even one such bird into Britain has been a most difficult matter while this British Colony commits them in thousands a year
to the cooking pot.
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conceivably tens of thousands
In the mid-sixties Fred Hechtel, who's an exceedingly busy businessman, was regularly buying birds of prey from the shops for rehabilitation in his flat, and then release.
PENN
Hechtel.
Young kestrel
it's also got sinusitis
t
you can see its
eyes closing up. All swollen underneath the eyes. One buzzard just about dead underneath. And another buzzard right
down the bottom. That one you can see how the tail has gone and the ends of the wings have gone. This one lumps on the edge of the wing? Well, that is the rubber solution they trap them with.
(Fade on)
Ak
you see these
This bird here dying literally hardly able
to lift up its head. This buzzard....
A South China device for trapping birds of prey is a set of bamboo sticks dipped in rubber solution which spreads increasingly over the bird's body and wings the more frantically it struggles to
escape.
Hechtel.
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literally
If these feathers were very seriously gummed up with rubber I wouldn't touch the bird. On the other hand, I've managed to clean wing feathers which have not been too badly gummed up by catching the bird every evening, or once a day which of course was rather traumatic for the bird and gradually cleaning the feathers, usually with a soft toothbrush mechanically removing it very slowly, using a little bit of talcum powder. And by doing this we managed to remove quite a bit. And if it only affected a few of the feathers it would still then be possible to release the bird. Of course the great danger with nearly all these birds was that they had already damaged their tails seriously in the baskets in which they came, especially if they were very crowded. And of course