🔗 Share this article

The conservationist's eyes scan over miles of tall grassland, searching for suspicious activity in the pre-dawn darkness.

He speaks in less than a whisper as we try to find a spot to hide in the fields. Behind us, the huge urban center of Beijing slumbers on. During the vigil, the only sound is the quiet of the morning.

Suddenly, as the sky starts to lighten with the approaching day, there is the crunch of footsteps. Illegal trappers are present.

Trapped

In the skies above us, a multitude of winged travelers, some tiny enough that they can fit in the palm of your hand, are traveling to the south for winter.

They have taken advantage of the long summer days in Siberia, or Mongolia, consuming bugs and berries. As the year winds down and chilling gusts bring the initial freeze of winter, they are flying to southern locales to breed and eat.

There are over 1500 bird species, accounting for 13% of the global population – more than 800 of those are birds that migrate. Several of the major flyways they follow cross through China.

The area of meadow where we were, on the edges of the Chinese capital, is an oasis for small birds – any further and the urban landscape offer scant chance to rest among forests of concrete.

It is also an oasis for the poachers and their "barely visible nets", so thin you can barely see them.

The trap we stumbled upon was strung across a large section of the field and propped up with wooden sticks. At its center, a tiny bird was fighting hard to escape, but the more it struggled, the more its claws became tangled.

This was a meadow pipit, a species under protection in China, and an important "bio-indicator" – which signifies if its population is healthy, so is its environment.

Pursuing the Poachers

Silva, who is in his 30s, carries out this mission for free using his personal funds. He has given up on many sleeping hours to release trapped birds, and he has spent the last decade persuading the police in Beijing to take this crime seriously.

"In the early days, no-one cared," he says.

So he recruited volunteers who did care and established a group called the Beijing Migratory Bird Squad. He held community gatherings and invited the officials of the relevant authorities. These small and persistent acts of persuasion seem to have paid off. The police realized that catching poachers also helped in tracking down other kinds of criminal activity.

"It became clear our objectives became somewhat shared," Silva says, noting that implementation remains inconsistent.

Silva's love of birds started in childhood. He grew up in the nineties in a much changed capital.

He remembers exploring the grasslands on the city's edges where he discovered birds, frogs and snakes. "But starting from the 2000s, everything changed."

Rapid economic growth brought millions of rural workers to cities. This expansion meant grasslands were considered empty places to build, not conservation areas to conserve.

The transformation was alarming. The grasslands receded, as did the wildlife they housed.

"I decided back then to work in conservation and I followed this course," he says.

It has not been an easy life. One of Beijing's biggest bird dealers found out he was being investigated by Silva and retaliated.

"He gathered several of his accomplices who confronted me and beat me up," Silva recalls. He says he reported to the police but those responsible were not brought to justice.

He has also seen the departure of his team of helpers over the years. This work demands covert operations and lost sleep. Silva says few people are willing to take on the challenging and occasionally risky job.

"This is my full-time commitment," he says. "I made it a project because if you want to tackle this challenge, you must commit completely. You cannot be half-hearted."

He says fundraising pays for some of the costs – more than 100,000 yuan a year – but funding has declined because of the economic situation.

So he has developed new ways to hunt the hunters.

He examines aerial photos to find the trails created by the poachers. He maps those against the birds' migratory routes and looks for areas where they may rest. The aerial views can even show lines of net traps which can capture hundreds of small birds during darkness.

"Siberian rubythroats and bluethroats sell for a premium," Silva says. "In urban centers like Beijing and Tianjin, those who want to keep birds are now often affluent."

Although there are environmental regulations in place, Silva argues the penalties to punish the crime do not outweigh the financial benefits of trapping and trading songbirds.

Owning a pet bird was – and for some people in China, still is – a status symbol. This dates back to the Qing dynasty. Wealthy individuals would build elaborate bamboo cages to display their birds.

This custom that persists mainly among retired men in their 60s or 70s. Silva says some elderly citizens may not understand they are committing a wildlife crime, or grasp that numerous birds were killed in a trap so they could buy a caged bird.

"This generation often lacked enough to eat growing up. Now with some disposable income, they have adopted the practice of caging birds," he says. "The nation progressed so fast, there was no time to raise awareness about ecology. Once people's attitudes are set, they're really hard to change."

Busted

On a long low wall in Beijing, a trader has several tiny enclosures with tiny twittering birds.

A separate individual is positioned near a local market holding a bird cage shrouded in a dark cloth. He tells passers-by discreetly that his songbird is rare, worth nearly 1900 yuan.

This offers a view of an old Beijing where informal vendors have established a niche trade.

The path alongside the water stretches for several miles and on a sunny weekday morning, there were shoppers browsing everything from vintage jewellery to false teeth.

Information suggested that wild songbirds could be bought in a small park. The location was not concealed.

Loud music played from a speaker under the low trees where a troop of elderly ladies were choreographing a traditional dance. Nearby several men, all in their later years, had gathered with bird cages – some had multiple in their hands. Most were covered in black fabric.

But today there would be no sales because the police had arrived. They were interviewing the bird owners and recording details. Defiant, one man claimed he was {taking his caged bird for a walk|simply exercising his