Rob St John, writer and musician from the Lancashire part of the Ghost of Gone Birds project. 'To begin with there was a real sense of anticipation as we awaited the big push. There was a sense of people being little vigilantes and getting paranoid about others in the landscape. -- As the week has gone on there have been more birds and it's been interesting watching illegal hunting, we haven't seen any atrocities which in a way has been great. -- I am going to do a new piece of music, soundscapes of gunshots, bird song, sound in the lansacpe to create 20 mins of new music to evoke the migration and hunting.'Under EU leglislation, hunting or trapping birds in spring is illegal but the government of Malta, which joined the EU in 2004, allows hunting of turtle dove and quail at this time of year. Some 170 species of bird pass over Malta during the spring and autumn migration periods. Hunters regularly shoot other species including birds of prey which are stuffed for private collection. Spring Watch Malta is a conservation camp run by BirdLife Malta, a non-profit which lobbies against bird hunting in the country. In 2012, fifty volunteers from across Europe converged on a tourist hotel in Bugibba in northern Malta and fanned out to track migrating birds and monitor any illegal spring hunting by the 11,000 permitted hunters..