A federal judge issued an arrest warrant Monday for a Montana man who failed to show up for an initial court appearance on charges of killing thousands of birds, including bald and golden eagles. A second defendant pleaded not guilty.
The two men, working with others, killed about 3,600 birds on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation and elsewhere over a six-year period beginning in 2015, according to a grand jury indictment unsealed last month. The defendants also were accused of selling eagle parts on a black market that has been a long-running problem for U.S. wildlife officials.
Who the fuck is buying eagle parts on the black market?!?!
Finally get a chance to tell this story. One time years ago I was at a fly fishing shop hanging around when a dude came in trying to sell a box of beautifully tied traditional salmon flies. He said that they were made from exotic materials including eagle feathers, blue heron feathers, tiger fur, and polar bear hair, some others. The shop owner immediately turned him away and then before leaving he offered instead to buy any exotic materials the fly shop owner might have around.
The three of us who were there in the shop figured it seemed like a sting attempt and the guy was likely some kind of federal wildlife law enforcement.
So, apparently there are some collectors of fly fishing flies that traffic in banned animal parts.
Damn there really are nerds for everything huh
I listened to a podcast about people who make fly fishing lures. Some sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. A person broke into a museum (in England I think) and stole a bunch of irreplaceable extinct bird specimens then used them to make fly fishing lures. That rabbit hole goes deep as fuck.
I wish they’d stick to this instead of the Epstein shit
Fly fishing is popular and a lot of fly fishermen get very, very into making flies.
Nerds, in other words.
Which is cool.
Yeah, if he went to the extent of collecting that stuff, I doubt he’d be the type to sell it to a local shop.
But given that you overheard it, and his offer to buy materials, he wasn’t after the shop owner, he was after the local black market.
That’s a good point. I always figured just the shop owner because why not just watch the place until it was empty? But, I thought, my bud and I had parked at a nearby fishing pull off and walked maybe fifty yards to the fly shop, and we had lingered there, which wasn’t uncommon, because it was the type of place the old timers stop in for a cup of coffee in the morning. Not that that’s what I was doing, I was there after lunch. To someone scoping out the joint it could have seemed empty, anyway.
I guess you’re right though, even if it was just the shop owner, why turn the offer to unknown customers? If the owner were involved in such things, he would understand a prospective trafficker that didn’t want to talk in front of others.
At the time I found the offer out of place and awkward, and thought, who would spend that kind of money on flys and then try and fish with them? He kept talking about the materials and their great qualities at trapping air, or absorbing water, and how they refract light, and how fish see and what not, and how great they are for actually fishing with, which is bullshit. As an experienced fly angler I knew that a hungry fish doesn’t really inspect a fly close enough to regard such detail. I’ve seen trout caught with cigarette butts tied to a hook shank and all sorts of pieces of boot leather and string fashioned onto a hook. At that time I was thinking about how I am the greatest trout angler alive and have no need for such trinkets no matter how rare, not to catch trout with. And one hungry trout can wreck any combo of string and glue, if a tree doesn’t take the fly from you before the fish get a chance to wreck it. He had some excuses that were believable, the heron he said was roadkill and the eagle feathers from an indigenous merchant. I don’t know if that’s legit. I knew I was not buying any eagle feathers from any stranger and so did the shop owner. My bud expressed some interest but when the two of us were unimpressed, he lost interest too. He would spare such expense for the attention if he thought it would have gotten him any. Shop owner dead and gone, cut ties with the bud ages ago.
Eagle builders?
If they didn’t make the eagle parts so easy to steal, people would get replacement parts from the OEM instead of going to the black market.
Eagle theft is a service issue.
There’s a market for them in oddities art. Bones and feathers, mostly, to my understanding.
'Murica
China probably
I’m OK with staking the fucker down and covering him with bird seed and fish parts to get the eagles to extract revenge.
What’s the thing with the Greeks and the eyes and the crows and the every day and the whatnot?
Prometheus comes to mind
Ty! Zeus is a helluva mf
They could have just stuck with killing geese and no one would have complained.
As a goose, I find this offensive.
I am sorry that you are a trash bird.
I wonder how they treat eagle killers in prison.
I would like to believe there is a hard core motorcycle gang out there that is completely not cool with killing innocent wildlife like that.
