A man from Northeast China's Liaoning Province received a sentence of three years behind bars and was fined 5,000 yuan ($739) on Tuesday after he was found guilty of trafficking 27 wild birds, local media reported Thursday.
According to the ruling of a court in Jianchang county, Huludao, the trafficker surnamed Qu hunted and sold dozens of precious birds, including rosefinches, short-eared owls and yellow-billed grosbeaks and sold them at prices ranging from 10 to hundreds of yuan, the Shenyang-based Liaoshen Evening News reported.
Police officers from the forestry bureau of Jianchang nabbed Qu after receiving a tip-off in May, which said the trafficker was using illegal nets and lures to hunt birds in a nearby forest.
Chinese government has increased its efforts to protect wild animals recently, especially as bird migration season approaches.
Police in North China's Hebei Province, working with bird protection societies, rescued more than 36,400 migratory birds - about one sixth of which were from an endangered species - from being sent to southern China for consumption, news site thepaper.cn reported in September.
Rescuers looking through the bird traffickers' base located in Dahanzhuang, a village under Tangshan, found drugs used to fatten birds and antibiotics to keep them healthy in their cramped and dirty living spaces where more than 6,100 yellow-breasted buntings, an endangered species, were caged, according to the report.
According to the Liaoshen Evening News, some of the buyers purchased wild birds to keep them as pets while others merely sold them to restaurants at a high price.
