Poaching Birds Is Big Money for the Mafia in Cyprus—but a Brave Few Are Fighting Back

Every night during fall migration, from midnight until late morning, activists in Cyprus drive slowly along back roads with their windows rolled down, scanning fields for flashlights moving against the otherwise still landscape and listening for unnaturally loud calls of Eurasian Blackcaps. They know real warblers aren’t belting out those songs. Poachers blare the calls from speakers to attract and snare songbirds, killing hundreds of thousands of individuals each year. The small cadre of volunteers who work with the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS), an organization that combats illegal trapping across Europe, hope to catch poachers in action.

Around 4:30 a.m. on a Friday in October, two activists hear blackcap calls coming from an open field. They park and then quietly backtrack on foot, slipping through the darkness toward the source of the sound. As they approach, they see two men with flashlights setting up a net in a patch of thin trees. Well aware that gangs control much of the bird poaching on the island, they retreat and phone the police rather than risk a violent altercation.

I’m waiting with Pertev Karagozlu when he answers the call and quickly mobilizes the anti-bird-trafficking police unit he oversees. Karagozlu is chief inspector of operations and crime for the Sovereign Base Areas (SBA), slivers of British-controlled territory that are a relic of the colonial rule that ended in 1960. Reflecting the seriousness of the criminals they’re up against, the couple dozen members of this specialized unit carry Tasers, Glock 17s, and MP7s. Karagozlu divides the officers into two groups: One will drive off-road, lights off, to a spot about a mile from the poachers and then walk the rest of the way. The other will locate the poachers’ vehicle to block their escape. Once everyone is in place, they’ll ambush and arrest the poachers and set free any birds they find alive.

Songbird poaching isn’t unique to Cyprus: An estimated 11 million to 36 million birds, many of them migrants, are killed each year across 23 Mediterranean countries, including Italy, France, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. However, the island plays an outsize role in these avian deaths. In sheer quantity of birds killed, Cyprus ranks second in the European Union only to Italy—a country more than 30 times its size. That’s partly because of its location: Cradled in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, in the middle of one of the four major flyways linking Europe and Africa, the island attracts millions of birds that pause to rest and refuel mid-journey, creating a bottleneck that makes poaching all the easier. Of the roughly 400 bird species recorded here, more than 200 are migratory. Many individuals that stop over never leave. “For Europe and certainly the European Union, Cyprus is one of the worst countries for the illegal killing of birds,” says Willem Van den Bossche, a BirdLife International senior flyway conservation officer.

Karagozlu and his colleagues work closely with CABS and BirdLife Cyprus, an NGO dedicated to protecting wild birds and their habitats. Together they’ve made significant strides in reducing bird poaching in the SBA. Karagozlu and his team share the conviction that killing birds is a serious crime, on par with trafficking methamphetamine or stealing cars. “Although most people think that the world belongs to us, we belong to the world,” Karagozlu says. “We should respect what we have.”

Yet the number of birds illegally trapped in Cyprus overall is on the rise. That’s because poaching is most rampant in a portion of the island mostly out of the SBA’s purview: the areas around the town of Ayios Theodoros and in a region of rural communities called the Red Villages (named for their vibrant clay soil) that largely belong to the Republic of Cyprus. There, the political will to combat poaching has waned. As a result, activists and conservationists receive little support from law enforcement—and face growing danger and resistance from organized crime.

In the wee hours of that autumn morning, I witness the problem firsthand. Bumping along a rutted dirt track in an unmarked police SUV, Karagozlu spots a figure running through the dark. He floors it, then jolts to a halt as a CABS activist dressed in black, wide-eyed as a deer, darts into the headlights. “Where?!” Karagozlu exclaims as he jumps out of the car. The woman frantically gestures at the inky outline of a stand of trees. The police search the area with the aid of a thermal camera–equipped drone, but the poachers have disappeared. They’ve fled into the Republic of Cyprus, mere meters away.

As soon as the SBA officers realize what’s happened, they call the closest Republic police station for assistance. But as is nearly always the case, the Republic police do not help. They give Karagozlu the usual line: “lack of resources.” 

T

o an outside observer, cypriots seem to have  a special fondness for birds. Gorgeous silkscreen renderings of Bearded Reedlings, White Storks, and Eurasian Hoopoes greet passengers at the Larnaca airport; bird artwork adorns buildings and posh restaurants in the island’s charming capital, Nicosia; and one southern village has even adopted the blackcap as its logo. Scratch below the surface, though, and the friendly demeanor toward birds resembles the ulterior motives of the ravenous titular characters in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” As the “Birdwatching” section of my guidebook stated, “Cypriots have the reputation for preferring to eat rather than watch songbirds.”

The demand comes overwhelmingly from Greek Cypriots, who consider songbirds a delicacy, and poaching is concentrated in the portion of the island where they live. (A brief geography lesson: The Republic of Cyprus governs 64 percent of the island and is home to Greek Cypriots; the SBA controls 3 percent; Turkey has occupied the remainder since its invasion in 1974. The United Nations oversees strips of no-man’s-land in between.) Some Greek Cypriots eat songbirds at home while drinking with friends and family, frying the birds with a sprinkling of salt and eating them in a single bite like sushi. They’re also served at some traditional tavernas, reserved off-menu for trusted patrons and often camouflaged under a bed of pilaf or a blanket of grape leaves.

Like Cyprus itself, ambelopoulia—a catch-all term for various preparations of songbirds, which are typically served whole—has a complicated history. In the late Middle Ages, Cypriots exported barrels stuffed with thousands of salt-preserved songbirds to Rome and Venice, where they were sought after. Later, during the Ottoman and British occupations, impoverished locals relied on birds for protein. As the economy improved, though, trapping for pleasure and profit reemerged.

Today’s poachers employ two methods. The traditional one consists of setting out limesticks, a type of homemade, booby-trapped perch that is covered with a sticky glue made from the boiled fruit of the Syrian plum tree. Birds land, only to have their feet stuck in the goo. Mist nets stretching up to 65 feet long are a more contemporary tactic. Both are indiscriminate, leading to the capture of at least 157 species—90 of which are of conservation concern, including critically endangered Yellow-breasted Buntings and threatened Bluethroats, as well as passerines of lesser conservation concern such as Thrush Nightingales, Whinchats, and Eurasian River Warblers. And while consumers prefer blackcaps and other songbirds, plenty of other species, including owls, Red-footed Falcons, and Pallid Harriers, are collateral damage—killed but not eaten. “Birds from the most rare to the most common are killed,” Van den Bossche says. “There’s just no control at all.”

Around the world, many environmental treaties and conventions went into effect in the 1970s. In 1974, during that era, Cyprus outlawed the songbird trade, as well as the use of mist nets and limesticks. A law is also in place in the Turkish Cypriot-controlled north and has been effective in that region because people of Turkish origin do not traditionally trap or eat birds; only a few known trapping sites exist there today, according to BirdLife Cyprus. In the Republic, though, lax enforcement led to a boom in ambelopoulia consumption in the decades following the ban. Today birds sell for up to 6 euros ($6.44 USD) each, generating an estimated more than 15 million euros ($16.17 million USD) annually.

It’s easy to find people willing to talk about ambelopoulia, despite it being illegal to possess. When I ask my cab driver about the delicacy, he informs me that he currently has 12 of the birds in his fridge and the taste is “very nice.” At Harátsi—a hipster café next to a blockade of green barrels and barbed wire marking the division between the Republic and Turkish-occupied north—owner Stavros Lambrakis shows me a photo on his phone of around two dozen ambelopoulia that someone he knew posted on Facebook three days before. “It’s illegal,” he says, “yet people don’t really care.”

“Politicians do it,” adds a woman seated next to me, possibly referring to a Cypriot member of the House of Representatives who posted a photo of himself posing with ambelopoulia in 2015 (a photo that is still up on his Facebook page). Demetris Aristidou, a retired professor, says, “I come from a generation where some people went out hunting because it was the only meat they could have.” Aristidou says that some people eat ambelopoulia today because it’s “a macho thing.” Others maintain that it signals national pride and connection to the past. Aristidou contends, “It’s not an excuse to eat these little birds.”

A local professional who asks to be identified only as Demosthenes readily admits to traveling to Red Village tavernas for ambelopoulia on special nights out. Just the week before, he’d eaten eight birds at a restaurant, he tells me. As proof, he texts me photos of ambelopoulia, naked and yellowish, displayed on plates and floating in a murky soup. The taste, he says, is “pure fat.” Restaurant owners “usually keep the police happy with money,” he claims.

Behind the bar, Lambrakis nods. 

E

nforcement wasn’t always lax in the republic. its police briefly had “one of the most effective enforcement units in Europe on wildlife crime,” says Tassos Shialis, a BirdLife Cyprus campaigns coordinator. An anti-poaching team created in 2007 and backed by the federal government specifically targeted bird gangs and other wildlife criminals. Mist-netting activity alone decreased by 88 percent from 2002 to 2023—a decline largely credited to the team’s efforts.

All that changed a few years ago. I met over coffee with a former Republic officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional blowback. During his five years with the unit, he collaborated closely with activists from CABS and helped to secure more than 250 poaching prosecutions. Yet even as the Republic cracked down on traditional trappers, he says, organized crime was gaining a foothold in the trade. It was “the elementary school of the mafia,” he says, and a major moneymaker for criminal gangs.

Things took a turn in 2017, after the anti-poaching unit began investigating a suspected major poacher, a mafia head who goes by the alias Akas. Soon after, three officers were moved to another department. The officer I spoke with and others strongly suspect that Akas arranged the move. “All the sacrifices, all the professionalism—in one day, they were thrown to the garbage,” he says of the transferred officers, whom he considered among the unit’s most effective members. “That’s the power of the mafia in Cyprus.”

The officer says he reported the apparent corruption to a Cyprus official, then met with the European Commission in Brussels. Bird trapping is forbidden by the European Birds Directive, legislation that aims to protect wild birds and their habitat in the EU. Under the directive, nonselective hunting methods like mist nets are banned for member states. He says nothing changed after the meeting.

Andrea Rutigliano, the CABS campaigner who oversees Cyprus, told me he wasn’t surprised by this. Since Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, he says, Commission officials have done little more than pay lip service to its ongoing violations against European avian heritage laws. However, the Commission has taken legal action against other countries. In 2004, for example, EU officials convicted Spain for permitting the use of limesticks for trapping Song Thrushes, and in 2018, Malta was convicted for failing to fulfill its obligations under the Birds Directive. Multiple Commission members did not respond to requests for an interview.

After the 2017 transfers, bird-trapping prosecutions declined. In 2019, the Republic’s chief of police dismantled the entire unit, citing “poor enforcement action,” a local newspaper reported. The real reason, Shialis suspects, is the unit had been too effective.

Elected Republic officials also watered down the penalties for bird poaching, setting the fine for using limesticks at 200 euros, compared to 2,000 or more for similar offenses. And the fine for killing the 14 species most sought after for ambelopoulia, including blackcaps, Golden Orioles, and European Bee-eaters, was reduced from 2,000 euros per bird to just 200 euros for up to 50 birds.

Further complicating anti-poaching efforts, the Republic police and its Game and Fauna Service (GFS) share responsibility for bird crime. The GFS is tasked with protecting wildlife, but its officers aren’t trained or equipped to deal with professional outlaws. “These are serious criminal gangs and serious criminal persons; they’re not your average poacher,” Shialis says. “The game warden is not able to cope with that.” Yet when CABS activists call the police for help, Rutigliano says, officers often shift responsibility to the GFS. That’s because for the police, poaching isn’t a top priority, says Pantelis Hajiyerou, head of the GFS. More, not less, action is needed, he says. 

In a seemingly positive step, last year newly elected Republic President Nikos Christodoulides reinstated the anti-poaching unit. But Hajiyerou says it won’t have any effect on poaching for ambelopoulia, because it was largely reinstated to crack down on poaching of traditional game species like hare and partridge, per the interests of Cyprus’s influential legal hunting community. Migratory songbird trapping, he says, “is not a major issue for them.”

After trying for more than a month to reach the Republic police’s anti-poaching head, I received a reply from an official asking me to send questions by email. My queries about the dismantling of the original anti-poaching unit and its priorities since being resurrected were never answered.

Just as anti-poaching efforts in the Republic were winding down, they ramped up in the SBA. In 2016 Britain’s then-Prince Charles, alarmed by reports of bird trapping, ordered the creation of the SBA police team. In its small territory, the SBA has found that charging illegal trappers does indeed deter bird crime. In its first season, officers made 72 arrests and seized 1,509 traps. In 2023, they made just 14 arrests and seized 129 traps—a 94 percent overall reduction in crime. I met Chambis Chimonas, a potato and fig farmer who was previously a prolific trapper, at a now-defunct trapping site. “In the old days everyone would come here and trap,” he said. “Now no one comes here because everyone’s in jail or they’ve paid huge fines. It’s not worth it.” 

A

s authorities in the republic have backslid on the songbird poaching problem, the island’s two bird non-profits have upped their efforts. While CABS favors hands-on intervention, BirdLife Cyprus focuses on collecting data to push authorities to do their job.

On a bright afternoon I join Markos Charalambides, a BirdLife Cyprus campaigns and monitoring officer, as he walks with practiced quiet through an overgrown field of crisp grass in the Famagusta district. We’re only a few minutes’ drive from some of the Republic’s most popular beach resorts, but it feels like we’ve entered a parallel plane of decrepitude. Rusted washing machines and heaps of sun-bleached rubbish line a barely discernible trail leading to a patch of bushy olive trees. Charalambides beelines to a tree with obvious signs, to his trained eye, of trapping: low-hanging branches that have been pruned to allow for easier installation of limesticks. Sure enough, the ground is littered with traces of warbler. “The feathers are fresh,” he whispers, pointing to still-sticky globs of brown glue stuck to them. He estimates that dozens of birds were recently captured here, though they don’t find any limesticks; if they did, they’d leave the trapping paraphernalia in place and report it to the authorities to collect as evidence.

Since 2002 the BirdLife Cyprus team has systematically monitored for signs of trapping during migration. Each year they randomly select 60 sites in the main poaching areas, from which they extrapolate the total number of birds killed per season in mist nets and look for trends. Their data indicate poaching is on the rise once again: Last year an estimated 435,000 birds were illegally trapped and killed, and mist netting increased by 6 percent compared to 2022.

After Charalambides’s team struck out the day I joined them, he tipped off CABS, and when Boštjan Deberšek—a wildlife crime officer with the group—visited the site, he found a man collecting traps. Deberšek confronted the poacher and called the game wardens, who responded and confiscated 25 limesticks. With Deberšek’s help, they saved three robins. The trapper was fined for poaching.

CABS always calls the authorities when they find an active poaching site, but the Republic police and wildlife wardens do not respond to calls at night, and during the day it’s hit or miss. Left on their own, CABS members record the poachers with cameras to gather evidence and, in rare cases, remove trapping paraphernalia if no poachers are around; if they are, activists sometimes confront them, as Deberšek did, which Rutigliano admits “is extremely risky.”

Rutigliano and his colleagues have submitted detailed evidence about major alleged trappers, including Akas, to the Republic police, the GFS, and the European Commission, but they say this has elicited little action. Meanwhile, violence against CABS activists has escalated. They’ve been chased and assaulted, received death threats, and had their vehicles vandalized. In 2022 a planted bomb destroyed one ­member’s car, which fortunately was empty. The group interpreted the incident as retribution for a local news station running a segment featuring a CABS video of Akas’s alleged gang. “They’re looking for ways to stop us,” Deberšek says. “One way is to be aggressive.”

Much of the aggression has been caught on video, and even when the police or wardens are present, they’re often too afraid to intervene, Deberšek says. A 2021 recording, for example, shows Akas threatening and assaulting CABS members and shoving a Republic police officer. In a 2023 video, three wardens stand by as two poachers collect mist nets tangled with birds. For officials to allow criminals to walk away with “live animals which are suffering and dying” is unacceptable, Deberšek says.

When I ask Hajiyerou, the Republic official, about this incident, he says “it’s easy for us in the office to judge people who were out there.” His men were caught off guard; they were “expecting to see an old man and suddenly they were in the middle of a major gang.”

An estimated 15 to 20 gangs now engage in bird trapping in Cyprus, says Shialis, who notes that Akas’s alleged gang operates with near impunity, erecting up to 12 mist nets a night. I ask to see his operation but am told it’s too dangerous to view, even from afar. 

I

t is possible to reduce bird poaching in the region, as proven by success in other countries. In 2013, for example, the Italian Parliament responded to intensive campaigning by tightening hunting laws, making it nearly impossible to kill species such as the Brambling and European Chaffinch. Following lawsuits filed by the French League for the Protection of Birds, another BirdLife partner that CABS works with, in 2022 France’s supreme court outlawed stone-crush traps that indiscriminately kill dozens of species, including the Fieldfare and Redwing. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for bird poaching, Van den Bossche says, and every situation will have to be tailored to the culture, politics, ecology, and law-enforcement capabilities of the place.

On that night at the café, I ask Demosthenes if anything would make him stop eating ambelopoulia. If the police started penalizing diners, he says—something they’ve never done—it’d probably be a strong deterrent. When I ask him how he feels about the birds he eats, he says “I feel sorry for some animals, but not for the birds.” He allows that if he knew more about birds, maybe he would care more.

His response points to a significant hurdle to disincentivizing poaching, but also to a potential path forward: establishing an affinity for birds in the hearts and minds—rather than stomachs—of Cypriots like Demosthenes. “If we don’t turn this from socially acceptable to socially unacceptable, then no matter how much enforcement we do, there will always be a criminal who wants to make a profit out of this,” Shialis says.

To that end, BirdLife Cyprus is creating a nature reserve in a trapping hotspot to try to cultivate an appreciation for wildlife. The team knows it will be an uphill climb—vandals have twice tried to set the reserve on fire—but as Shialis says, they have to start somewhere. They also have a full-time educational officer who gives talks about birds in schools. One teacher said that a student went home afterward and threw his father’s limesticks in the garbage.

Working with BirdLife Cyprus and collaborators, photographer Silvio Augusto Rusmigo took a different tack to raising awareness in 2022: He published a book on poaching and organized an interactive exhibition in Nicosia. He considers it a “huge success” that almost all of the 1,000 or so visitors, many of them cultural movers and shakers, had no prior connection to birds, but that many told him the exhibition opened their eyes to the criminality of ambelopoulia. “It’s creatives and artists that make what’s in and what isn’t in,” Rusmigo says. “We can make [ambelopoulia] a negative trend if we try.”

In the meantime, as activists try to exert pressure in the Republic, the SBA continues to aggressively pursue poaching operations. Early one morning near the end of my trip, I join the SBA police as they investigate a farm in the Red Village of Ayios Nikolaos. An officer shines a flashlight on a PVC pipe anchored in a concrete-filled tire, a sure sign of a recent mist net. Another officer signals from the base of a tall olive tree riddled with limesticks. Two officers nimbly climb up and begin removing the sticky traps, while others discover a limestick-making station.

They collect enough evidence to initiate a case and soon identify a suspect, who admits to the offenses and is formally charged. They also possibly save a life. Stuck upside down to one of the limesticks is a bright-eyed bird. Karagozlu gently removes the tiny blackcap, no larger than the length of his thumb, and picks the glue off its feathers before passing it to an officer to release it. “Having the bird in your hand and feeling its heart beat, feeling that it’s shaking, and then letting the bird free gives you a big relief—a big happiness,” Karagozlu says. “It’s a small thing, but we’re helping nature.”

In this modest grove, birds now find one more safe place to rest on Cyprus—a crucial link in their trek across the hemisphere. 

This story originally ran in the Summer 2024 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.