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Author Jonathan Franzen wrote a 2010 New Yorker magazine article about the trapping and poaching of songbirds.Hindustan Times

You didn't have to be a birder to be thoroughly distressed by American author Jonathan Franzen's eye-opening take on the disappearance of European songbirds. Migrating from Africa to Europe and western Asia in the spring and then back, fattened up, in the fall, the birds are cruelly trapped and poached for their meat. A traditional, if now illegal, delicacy in some countries, the songbirds are declining at an alarming rate.

In 2010, Franzen wrote a New Yorker magazine article about the disaster, bringing the little-known issue to light and spurring calls to action. It also caught the attention of a well-known filmmaker.

"Roger Kass read the article and had the response I would hope a New Yorker reader would have, which was, 'Oh my God, I knew nothing about this. This is terrible,'" said Franzen, famous American bestselling novelist, infamous non-embracer of Oprah and dedicated celebrity birder.

Kass had an idea: make a documentary about the issue, based on the article, with Franzen on board as executive producer. Franzen was in. Emptying the Skies opened in some Canadian theatres on Friday.

Franzen first heard about the issue from German birder friends, while birdwatching in Spain. They directed him to the website for the German-based Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) so he could learn more.

"I saw these really horrifying pictures of skinned birds and birds covered in lime sticks [glue-covered sticks] …" recalled Franzen, who was busy writing his novel Freedom at the time. He promised his friends that as soon as he was finished, he would look into the songbirds' plight and try to bring it to public attention. "I figured if I didn't know about it, then no one else in America did either."

He sent in revisions for Freedom in January, 2010, and launched into his research. By March he was on the ground in Italy. What he found was deeply upsetting: tiny songbirds, looking for a place to land during migration, were being poached – their feet or feathers stuck to gummy lime sticks inserted among branches by trappers; or lured into cages by live decoys; or their bones crushed in cruel bow traps.

Although the practice is banned, millions of songbirds are killed every year, the numbers caught using the traditional methods augmented significantly by large-scale netting operations. While certain species are targeted, many others are caught up, quite literally, in the trapping operations.

The migrating songbirds are a delicacy: In Cyprus, birds such as blackcap warblers are served grilled, pickled, boiled or fried in a dish called ambelopoulia; in France, the ortolan bunting, a sparrow, is captured and drowned in Armagnac, then roasted and eaten with a large napkin over the diner's head to capture the aromas and heighten the experience. Millions of songbirds are consumed every year, illegally served in restaurants.

The issue is hugely polarizing in Europe and has had nasty consequences – cars have been torched, people beaten or shot at. In Cyprus, Franzen and a CABS team, out on a rescue operation, were confronted and attacked by angry locals. "I had not had violence directed at me since junior high and certainly never in the form of large rocks flying my way," Franzen said.

In the name of reportage, Franzen forced himself to submit to a clandestine restaurant visit, where he choked down some fried song thrush and a small portion of ambelopoulia. "It was so weird because the same bird that was being served in the restaurant I'd seen flitting around in the bushes by the parking lot of the restaurant," he explained. "And there is such a gulf between the bird lover in the birdwatching sense, and the bird lover in the carnivorous sense that it was just weird. And of course what we were doing was illegal, so to be involved as a co-conspirator with the restaurant in this illegal act heightened the weirdness."

When the New Yorker article was published in July, 2010, it sparked widespread outrage, just as Franzen had hoped.

While his experiences formed the backbone of the magazine article, the documentary focuses more on the CABS rescue team, a ragtag group of dedicated "investigations officers" who take the law into their own hands – specifically the European Union's landmark 1979 Birds Directive, which bans activities that directly threaten birds. Franzen also appears in the film, interviewed extensively about the subject.

As described in his 2006 memoir, The Discomfort Zone, Franzen discovered birdwatching after the death of his mother in 1999. "My mother died, and I went out birdwatching for the first time in my life," he wrote in the book's final essay. On Hat Island, north of Seattle, he encountered eagles, kingfishers, Bonaparte's gulls, goldfinches, sparrows, a northern flicker, a veery. He was hooked.

He has written about it – in the memoir, the New Yorker article and with a central, bird-loving character in Freedom. He appeared in an HBO documentary, Birders: The Central Park Effect, and now has a central role in Emptying the Skies.

When asked about any pressures he might feel as a go-to celebrity birder, he recounted a conversation he had the previous evening with his "animal-loving spouse equivalent" about this very concern.

"I'm publishing a new novel … that's going to push some people's buttons, I think; it's going to get even more people angry with me as a novelist," he explained (while declining to reveal details about the work, other than to say it's his job to go to "psychologically very hot places" – culturally and socially – that get under the reader's skin).

"And I honestly said to her, 'I don't really care about hostile reactions to my fiction except I don't want it to be so hostile that people stop listening to me on the subject of nature conservation and birds,'" he continued. "In a way it's a weird pressure on me as a novelist. I feel like my job is to try to tell the truth as I see it, but also I want to be liked. I have been very strangely fortunate to get some prominence as a fiction writer and as a public figure. And the best thing I can think to do with that is to use it to try to help birds."

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