Anna Giordano

This article is about a Sicilian conservationist. For the Italian athlete Anna Giordano Bruno, see Anna Giordano Bruno.

Anna Giordano (born in 1965) is a Sicilian conservationist. A leader of Sicily's World Wide Fund for Nature, she won the Goldman Prize in 1998. She's known because of her work for the protection of wild birds and against the damages that the bridge over the Strait of Messina would cause in the environment.

She joined the Italian League for Bird Protection at the age of six. In 1981, after seeing 17 birds shot out of the sky by poachers shooting from cement bunkers, she committed herself to the fight against poachers. Challenging men in the Sicilian male-dominated society where there was a long tradition of hunting migrating raptors, created open hostility toward Giordano. When she began badgering police, forest rangers and local authorities to do something about the illegal killing, she was not taken seriously. But she persisted and, in 1984, began organizing camps of young people from all throughout the world who would gather each spring to observe the migrations and inform police when they saw poachers at work.

The hunters retaliated with threats and intimidation. In 1986 she narrowly escaped the firebombing of her car, and later poachers broke into her house and mailed her a dead falcon with a threatening note. After this and another incident where she and a group of young people monitoring the migration were shot at, local law enforcement officers began to aid Giordano in her efforts to stop rampant poaching.

She claims that in 1984, during the first camp, they counted about 3,100 raptors and storks, and 1100 shots — and in 2000, just a little bit less than 35,000 raptors and storks, and 5 shots.