BIRD EGGS, NESTS POSTED
FOR SALE ON eBAY
Article copyright The Charlotte Observer
July 10, 2004
BRUCE HENDERSON
Staff Writer
You really can find most anything on eBay -- even songbird nests from Charlotte back yards.
Bird lovers are aflutter over a rash of online, and illegal, sales of eggs and nests.
Beyond risking prison and a $250,000 fine, sellers taking nests at the height of the breeding season could hurt the species already in decline.
"Birds need all the help they can get," said Bill Hilton Jr., a York, S.C., naturalist. "Stealing the eggs and nests out from under them isn't going to help matters at all."
For 20 years, Hilton has banded hummingbirds to help study their migrations and breeding success. That's why an eBay listing of a hummingbird nest caught his eye early this month.
Hilton wrote the seller, who hadn't realized her error and removed the listing.
Many people don't know such transactions are illegal, wildlife experts say, or their potential harm. "Empty" nests may actually hold two or three clutches of eggs a year.
Most of the three dozen other sellers he and fellow birders have written since mid-June, Hilton said, didn't respond or tried to fudge the details.
"These birds live in my yard all year round and (are) not migratory birds," a Charlotte eBay seller who goes by "toad08" wrote in a June 20 listing of bluebird, wren, titmouse and chickadee nests.
Wrong, toad. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 -- that's the one punishable by up to two years in prison and a $250,000 fine -- protects more than 800 species, from bald eagles to Carolina chickadees.
The four Charlotte nests sold for $41, chickadee egg included.
The migratory bird law was a response to uncontrolled shooting of birds to sell on the meat market and to supply feathers for fashionable turn-of-the-century hats. The first national wildlife refuges also sprang out of public outrage over those practices.
The law makes it a misdemeanor to even possess bird parts, feathers, eggs and nests. The biggest penalties, felonies, are for selling them.
But Internet trading is almost impossible for understaffed wildlife agencies to track. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has 261 enforcement officers. Three million new items are listed each day on eBay.
"What the bird people are trying to do is monitor it for them," said Hilton, executive director of the Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History. An online network of birders and banders has been buzzing for weeks over the sales.
Sandra Cleva, a spokesman for Fish and Wildlife law enforcement, said hundreds of items illegal under wildlife law, from sea turtle shells to stuffed migratory birds, are traded online each day.
"It's hard to even start cataloging what may be sold on the Internet at any given time," she said. "We simply do not have the resources to pursue every sale."
Wildlife agents do periodically check online trading sites, Cleva said. She said eBay pulls illegal items when notified.
"Our general policy is that if it's illegal offline, it is illegal on eBay," company spokesman Chris Donlay said. "We do monitor for prohibited items, and when we find them, we take them down. Often it's things that people had no idea were illegal."
The numbers, again, stack the odds against vigorous security. EBay lists 25 million items, has 105 million users worldwide and $1,000 in trades change hands every second.
The two nests the Observer reported to eBay on Thursday were off the site by Friday.
But buyers could take their choice of four new listings.
Bruce Henderson: (704) 358-5051; bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com
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