That hasn’t stopped birds from becoming a hot commodity on the black market for wildlife-which, valued at more than $19 billion, is the fourth-largest global illicit trade (after narcotics, human trafficking, and counterfeit products), according to the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), which Congress passed a century ago, prohibits a host of activities considered to be harmful to birds, including their pursuit, hunting, capture, killing, possession, sale, barter, purchase, shipping, exportation, and importation. Court documents show the agent secretly recorded El Doctor, whose real name is Juan Carlos Rodriguez, as he exchanged the bird for an undisclosed sum of cash and talked about others he’d sold, including 60 Northern Cardinals to a California buyer the previous week.īy selling the spindalis, as well as the cardinals, Rodriguez broke the law. Later that day he drove to the seller’s home, a single-story beige house in Homestead, Florida, about 35 miles southwest of Miami. Fish and Wildlife Service, called the number in the ad and arranged to buy the spindalis.
The officer, a special agent with the U.S. On May 28, 2014, an undercover cop trawling the Internet read an advertisement about a bird for sale by someone calling himself “El Doctor.” The bird was a male Puerto Rican Spindalis, a colorful yellow-and-black island endemic that fills the highest treetops of its homeland with a sharp, melodious seet see seee seet see seee seet see seee.
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