Originally published at: EU court bans French hunters from gluing birds to trees | Boing Boing
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Why are they trying to capture these particular birds live - people don’t eat songbirds and thrushes anymore, do they?
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After the ortolan bunting, I’m not surprised.
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It’s not only French alas, in Italy the glue is called vischio and it was extensively used for that same purpose, to capture small birds. The birds were then indeed eaten, for instance polenta e osei , something that could be prepared by poor people who only had cheap ingredients like cornmeal and could not really hunt.
Nobody is going to miss that (save some reprobates), I was surprised to see it was still legal in France.
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Thankfully I learned as a child that this behavior ends with monkeys helping the birds get revenge and gluing all of the hunter’s furniture to the ceiling
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Uh, wow. Thanks humanity for constantly surprising me with new AND old ways of being inhumane to basically every-fucking-thing on Earth.
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I remember, well into the 1980s my dad would occasionally receive care packages from relatives in the Old Country that included (by then quite illegal to import) little jars of tiny pickled ortolans [ETA – link is safe for life, no images]. It was pretty horrifying but he chomped away on those things.
(The traditional Cypriot method of gathering the birds includes using birdlime as well.)
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More today from the what is apparently the “better late than never” philosophy that underline France’s jurisprudence.
Torturing birds and raping children will no longer be legal. Have a madeleine, mes amis!
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So that makes it alright then?
I am reminded of studies showing how British robins (Erithacus rubecula) are far more trusting of humans than European robins (also Erithacus rubecula), and this is probably part of the reason why.
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Just to make this clear, because this isn’t obvious from this sentence: while this kind of glue is called birdlime in English it is not made from lime. There is no way to make glue from lime. Rather, the name is cognate with German Leim (glue) in denoting a sticky substance.
English lime and slime also go back to the proto-Germanic *leimaz but the stickiness that gave lime its name wouldn’t be enough to catch a bird. Especially because it would never settle on the caustic chemical.
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Ha this was my first thought as well! Never occurred to me that this gruesome act by Mr Twit was based on anything other than Dahl’s gritty imagination 
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So “bird-slime” might be a more modern name?
I’m adding this to the list of things I never thought people would need to be told specifically not to do…
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gluing birds to trees
The pedant in me wants to argue that “applying glue to trees” and “waiting for birds to get themselves stuck” is very much not “gluing birds to trees.”
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The way this used to work is that the hunters would affix a tame bird of the same species to the glue area in the hope that it would attract its peers. So they did glue one bird to a tree in order to catch more.
Interestingly enough the word Lockvogel (luring bird) is still used in German to describe a person who is used as bait to lure someone into something, despite the fact that this method of hunting has largely fallen out of favour in the country hundreds of years ago.
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“lime” is a remarkable little homonym in English. A half dozen words with different etymologies, distinct meanings, same sound.
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I was long confused by the scooter-rental apps “Bird” and “Lime” because they seem like a reference to trapping birds with bird lime, but I couldn’t see what the connection could be.
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These are the same bastards that will chase a deer out of the forest into residential neighborhoods and shoot them at point blank range when they collapse exhausted in some poor family’s backyard. French hunters are the woooooooooooooooooooooorst !
Wait, so this only applies to hunters, right? You can still glue birds to a tree as long as it’s a sex thing, right?
