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
