(Flying storks and Malta)

Simon Barnes: wild notebook

All of us who must travel for our living, commuting or long-haul, find ways to keep going: iPod, books, newspapers, that sort of thing. But I have something extra, and it came in very handy in Paris this week while I am here writing about the rugby World Cup. I have the books and the iPod as well: but this extra something is the only one capable of delivering a bloody-hell-isn't-life-bloody-amazing moment that keeps you going.

It's not even binoculars. It's just habit. Wherever I travel, I take with me the habit of looking and listening: ears, eyes, mind, heart all open. This habit clicked in at a good time, too. I had just walked (transport strike) four miles across town to the Musée d'Orsay, only to learn that the Musée d'Orsay was closed because there was a transport strike.

But before the appropriate expression (merde alors!) could escape my lips, my eyes, open, were distracted by an incongruous flicker from the sky above. I turned my head: my words, though now brutally Anglo-Saxon, were uttered in delight and disbelief. A flying barn door. No, not a heron, wings too flat, too broad, too big, neck stretched out, not tucked in. Bloody hell, it was a stork.

A European white stork, the kind that brings babies, southing towards Africa and, for some extraordinary reason, taking in the sights of Paris on his way. A northern bird, coming down from Germany, perhaps, or Denmark. Rather late in the year for the journey, but a stunning, uplifting sight on a troublesome and chaotic day.

A day that changed as a result. The feeling, well known to all travellers, that life was being organised with your discomfort particularly in mind, vanished in the moment of a grand aerial circle as the great bird strove to gain height from the warm air that rose from the city, and then to continue south.

You need no equipment for such moments: just a homoeopathic dose of knowledge and a mind tuned to light up, like a pinball table, at such fine moments. I have had thousands of great days out in the wild: but sometimes I think that the greatest and most meaningful sights of the wild world come in a city. Certainly, these chance-found sightings are the most consoling.

It happens all the time in rugby: two dozen men get stuck into each other in a way that would get them banned for a month in football, for life in cricket and get them arrested in real life, and the ref says: "Calm down, lads, that's quite enough of that, and if there's any repetition, I'll get quite cross."

The same process is happening in Malta. Readers of this column will know that, every spring, thousands of birds are slaughtered there in direct contravention of European law, even though Malta has been an EU member since 2004. The birds killed include turtle doves heading for Britain, and the globally threatened lesser kestrel and pallid harrier.

Killed for what? For fun. The Maltese Government wants to stay in the EU but is frightened of alienating the hunters, so the blind eye is turned. But now the EU has given the last possible last warning: called, bizarrely, a "reasoned opinion".

This comes with the backing of Birdlife International and Birdlife Malta and, if it is ignored, the next step should be the European Court of Justice. In other words, if the spring hunting is allowed next year, the referee will really have no option but to send somebody off.