Speaker: Milan Ruzic, President of the Managing Board of the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BPSSS)

After the 1990’s Balkan wars stopped, many of the paramilitary groupings morphed into criminal syndicates running everything from guns, humans, drugs, illegal cigarettes and more. A lesser known stream of illegal activity is the trade in wild birds, which are plentiful in the Balkans due to its location as a major fly-way between Africa and Europe.

The trade is fueled mainly in two ways: dead birds for human consumption, delivered throughout Europe, and a thriving shooting/hunting trade focused on quail and doves when hundreds can be shot in a day. All this is despite a raft of international laws either forbidding this trade or restricting the shooting to certain periods.

Putting aside the conservation aspect, the illegality undermines civic structures and law through corruption, law-breaking and creates patronage systems based on law-avoidance.

Fighting this bird trade in Serbia is the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BPSSS), a small group of highly motivated bird conservationists who for their efforts get little recognition and a great deal of aggression that includes death threats and abuse as well as non-cooperation and deception from relevant authorities.

There is also a wider security dimension involving a ‘peace process’: the BPSSS swap information with their counter-parts in Croatia and other Balkan countries which in its way helps to build bridges between countries that only twenty five years ago were fighting each other. So the birders of Serbia point to a future of both hope and also darkness.

Here is very powerful YouTube footage of the BPSSS in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5AeQH_QG-Y

History of the Marjan-Marsh Award

The Marjan-Marsh Award is run in partnership with the Marsh Christian Trust. This award is given annually to someone who has made an invaluable contribution to an area where conflict and conservation overlap.

The Marsh Christian Trust was started in 1981 by businessman Brian Marsh to honour ‘unsung heroes’; since then the portfolio of awards has grown to over 70 across a wide spectrum that includes conservation, arts, heritage and social welfare.