The Killing Fields

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Investigator Terry Grosz is screening a snuff film. The quality is poor, but the action is gruesomely clear: a group of hunters, accompanied by Doberman pinschers, is stalking a bear and her cub in the New Hampshire woods. The mother dies relatively quickly from her wounds; her cub is less lucky. "Get her with this!" shouts a man, and pulls out a crossbow. Suddenly the cub squeals; imbedded in its skull, as if in some ghastly Saturday-morning cartoon, is an arrow. The hunter takes his time reloading. Finally, with his second shot, the bear falls to the ground, where the dogs set upon it. The hunters cheer; then one of them cuts open the cub's back, reaches into its body and pulls out the goal of all the butchery: the bear's gallbladder. He grins and holds up the bloody organ as if it were worth its weight in gold. Which it is.

The video, taken in 1992 by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service undercover agent, was later used to put the hunter in jail. Grosz, a 6-ft. 5-in. bear of a man who is an assistant regional director for law enforcement for the Fish and Wildlife Service, has seen the footage dozens of times in this Lakewood, Colorado, viewing room, yet he cannot control his sorrow, or his anger. His eyes still damp, he asks, "Did you see that? How they were killing the bears right in front of the camera? Those bastards . . ."

Brown bears. Bighorn sheep. Elk. But also gray-banded king snakes. Ducks. Spiders. Butterflies. Of all God's creatures, great and small, there are apparently few that enterprising Americans are unwilling to slaughter or kidnap in the country's national parks. Poaching in the parks has been a problem since they were founded in the 19th century, but never like this, says Grosz, echoing colleagues across the U.S. "I've been in the business for 30 years, and the problem is definitely at its worst," he says. "They're taking everything." Wildlife-enforcement officials estimate that there are 3,000 American black bears taken illegally every year.

The very sites designated for wildlife's preservation are becoming its abattoir, almost as if someone had let a serial killer into Noah's ark. Poachers haunt nearly half of America's 366 park areas, supplying animal parts to illegal traffickers who operate in at least 17 states. They supply bear paws as culinary delicacies and bear gallbladders as medicinal ingredients. Rare butterflies are netted for collectors around the world. Deer are decapitated to decorate homes. The illegal killing of animals is a $200 million-a-year business, with as much as $100 million of that amount for medicinal purposes. The victims include not only the big carnivores and grazers, but also more than 100 other species, 20 of which could become extinct sometime in the next century if their depletion continues at the current pace, the Park Service warns. Four of them -- the hawksbill sea turtle, brown pelican, peregrine falcon, and Schaus' swallowtail butterfly -- are already endangered. "I remember seeing salmon so damn thick in the river you could have walked on them," Grosz says. "Now they're scarce. And we're killing 5,000 different kinds of birds every year."

The forces arrayed against this threat are minuscule. There are an estimated 7,200 state and federal wildlife agents, 200 of which are U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agents, sprinkled over approximately 750,000 sq. mi. of parks. At Yellowstone National Park, 60 full-time rangers patrol a tract larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Says chief ranger Dan Sholly: "For every poacher we catch, there are 30 to 50 incidents that we don't even see." Adds Grosz: "Some days I figure I have Custer's odds." He has only 24 agents to juggle law enforcement with other duties.

The resulting massacre can be measured not only in the doomsday language of disappearing species. The continual hunting of the largest, fittest specimens might, some experts say, eventually weaken their respective common gene pools. At the very least, the criminals are denying a glimpse of the most magnificent specimens to the parks' millions of legal visitors. Longtime Yellowstone ranger Gerald Mernin, who has seen elk carcasses left behind by poachers interested in only their antlers, notes sadly that "people have always hunted in the backcountry. But it takes a different person to do this. This is America's heritage, and they're stealing it."

Poaching, defined by federal law as the hunting of protected animals or wildlife for a payment of more than $350, has some glamour in its past. Back in Sherwood Forest, taking the King's deer was a capital offense. Today illegal hunters come from all walks: studies identified many of the waterfowl poachers in Wisconsin as white-collar executives, while Missouri's deer poachers are largely unemployed workers. Some claim to be modern-day Robin Hoods, engaged in libertarian protest against Big Government. This amuses the rangers. The poachers' major motivation, says Grosz, is "ego and greed."

Ego inspires the off-season trophy hunters to employ off-season guides. "We've busted folks who have hired guides and said, 'I'll give you $5,000 every time I pull the trigger,' " says Grosz. Other clients, lazier or more timid, are content to order up contract killings. The current black-market price for one ready-to-mount bighorn sheep can go as high as $10,000. Grizzly bears fetch $25,000. Eagles and some of the rarer butterflies bring $1,000 apiece. Meanwhile, despite the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the principal wildlife-protection treaty, the global market in "medicinal" animal parts expands unabated. "The bear is like a walking bank account for poachers," says Grosz; almost all its parts are salable in Asia. South Korean folklore recommends bear gallbladder for ills ranging from convulsions to tooth decay. As a result, a bear gallbladder fetches up to $64,000.

Wildlife advocates see two primary solutions. One is to hire more rangers, which seems unlikely in the current budget-cutting climate. The other is to impose tougher federal laws, which now assign penalties as high as $250,000 for felonies and up to five years' imprisonment. Law enforcers also enlist % state laws to prosecute poachers in national parks, but state statutes vary notoriously. Wyoming, for instance, regulates hunters down to the number of shotgun pellets allowed in heavily hunted areas; while Alabama's idiosyncratic "coon on a log" law is more liberal, permitting the maintenance of up to 10 captured raccoons during a season for use in demonstrating "the abilities of the raccoon to resist being retrieved or taken from a log in a lake by a dog and the ability of the respective dogs to retrieve raccoons."

Nonetheless, Ruth Musgrave, director of the Center for Wildlife Law based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sees some cause for hope. "There's an ongoing effort to try to make the federal laws tougher," she says, "and the states are trying to coordinate their laws." Rangers around the country were heartened by the conviction of Don Lewis, a nationally known crossbow hunter, who had been brazen enough to have himself videotaped attacking a herd of elk -- smack in the middle of Yellowstone. Lewis pleaded guilty, was fined $15,000 and served 30 days of an 18-month prison sentence.

And then there was the Great Snake Bust. Snake poaching is a multimillion- dollar industry, in which poachers sell skins and live specimens to pet shops and private collectors through shady mail-order houses. So bad is the problem that scientists studying a recent plague of rats in some communities surrounding Texas' Big Bend National Park came to a startling conclusion: the problem resulted from the absence of their scaly natural predators, which had been nearly poached out.

There was jubilation in conservation circles last month when a newly formed U.S. Park Service antipoaching unit pulled off a classic sting operation, arresting 27 citizens from Texas to Florida in the biggest poaching bust in Park Service history. The feds posed as amateur herpetologists and would-be buyers; the crime ring's alleged kingpin, who regularly carried a semiautomatic pistol, gave up without a fight. The Park Service carried out the operation for only $15,000.

Shortly after the snake bust, Bill Tanner, the Park Service group's leader, got an ominous phone message at his Santa Fe headquarters. The caller wanted to assure him that if he sent another agent into the area, "you're gonna find him floating in the river." Tanner smiles. "That only means you're getting to these guys," he says. "You're doing your job." For poacher-hunting agents like Tanner, the big game is thick on the landscape.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Yellowstone National Park