Unnatural Companions by Peter Christie

Author:Peter Christie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Back in Miami, USFWS Agent Pharo believes culture plays a role too. Florida’s seemingly untamable hunger for wild birds, he says, is far more common in particular communities in town. For Caribbean and South American residents, for example, filling a home with the treetop music of a jungle bird is tradition. Acquiring birds from local trappers is something many people in Latin countries have always done. Biophilia—in this sense—is a time-tested custom. “Miami and South Florida are a kind of the melting pot of Latin America, and, of course, a lot of these Latin cultures bring this type of activity here to the United States,” Pharo explains. “They are very, very enthusiastic about certain bird species, and it just has grown from there.”

Pharo echoes Sheldon Jordan’s view that laws and more agents can do only so much; awareness is key. In April 2018, Pharo and other Miami wildlife enforcement officials invited television cameras and other media to the middle of Everglades National Park. They wanted reporters to watch as they carted cages holding about 130 birds from a white SUV and released them into the surrounding trees. The birds were among those rescued during Pharo’s Operation Ornery Birds investigations. Images show photographers lined along the ground as the door of one large cage is lifted and dozens of colorful birds explode into the air: “I am thrilled that our more than 1.5 million visitors who visit Everglades National Park can once again see these birds fly free in their native habitat,” Justin Unger, the park’s deputy superintendent, announced to reporters. The officials were hoping the elaborate news event might bring home the conservation side of the story.17

It was a grand hope. Wildlife crime has exploded in the past 10 to 15 years, and trafficking in wild species is now the fourth largest criminal trade behind illegal drugs, counterfeiting, and human trafficking, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It’s worth up to $20 billion annually. Across the United States, the equivalent of about 60,000 wildlife shipments, representing perhaps millions of individual creatures and plants, illegally change hands every year. The Internet and social media exacerbate the problem, opening fluid new avenues for faster and more-difficult-to-track exotic pet sales. America’s particular brand of biophilia, as it turns out, has helped distinguish the country as one of the largest consumers of illegal wildlife in the world. Miami is its epicenter. “This is a recurring issue here,” Pharo says, grimly. “It’ll probably never go away in my lifetime.”18

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