the weird work of intercepting trafficked wildlife in Alaska

Chris Andrews was working the conveyor belt at the Anchorage airport last fall, watching international cargo arrive.

“An employee said, ‘Hey, this box smells, Chris,'” Andrews said.

The box had a “car parts” label on it.

Other smelly boxes also came from the belt. When Andrews opened, he found them filled with thousands of shark fins, probably shipped to Hong Kong for shark fin soup. In the end, officers seized 1,600 pounds of shark fins from nearly 17,000 sharks nationwide. This was a big case, and it was all connected to the first boxes Andrews found in Anchorage.

“If it didn’t smell, we wouldn’t be able to get that shipment,” he said.

Andrews is a wildlife inspector with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He and his team are tasked with stopping smuggled wild animals. They enforce international conservation agreements and national laws, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act, that protect more than 40,000 species.

It’s a weird job and he loves it.

They find something every day at airports and ports around Alaska. They seized commercial shipments of designer bags made of crocodile or python skin, as well as ill-advised international souvenirs. On one occasion, Andrews stopped a passenger carrying two stuffed lizards, each the length of a skateboard. The passenger got off the plane carrying a large garbage bag on his shoulder. Andrews said the lines coming out made him suspicious.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, what’s in this bag?’ “I asked,” he said.

The man did not have a permit for the protected reptiles, so he had to give them up.

Live animals are less common, Andrews said. They find these maybe a dozen times a year.

“We had some monitor lizards smuggled into the speakers,” he said. “They put them in socks and tried to hide them inside the speakers.”

Some of that traffic is driven by people trying to obtain samples to complete unusual collections, Andrews said.

“So we see cockroaches, we see chalk bugs, we see ants,” he said.

Andrews said the study is important for protecting ecosystems and protected animals. But daily tasks are also fun for him. He never knows what will be in the next box.

That makes it scary.

“There are some really aggressive spiders in India that are the size of dinner plates,” Andrews said. “Every time I open a box they say, ‘Please don’t be that person!’ “I hesitate.”

Andrews said finding a live animal poses a challenging, time-sensitive problem: “How do we keep this thing alive? Is it poisonous? Where does it come from?”

Andrews said it was just like the day they found 400 baby turtles smuggled into a pair of snow boots. There were 12 different species.

“I didn’t know what they ate,” Andrews said. “I didn’t know if they liked warmth. I didn’t know if they liked water. Here I was with a terrarium book, just trying to figure out what they were.”

This wasn’t what he expected when he took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He studied forestry at university.

“It was a wildlife location in Alaska,” Andrews said. “I thought I’d be dealing with bears and deer. I’ve never dealt with a deer.”

Thirty years later, the job still excites him. But young people are bored with the work stories he brings home.

“Sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re going to love this!’ “I think,” he said. “And then they just say, ‘Okay, yeah, Dad, another dead monkey or whatever you found.'”

Andrews said his team may sometimes use confiscated property. A few years ago, the department seized 10 electric guitars made of protected Brazilian rosewood. Now those guitars are in the hands of Anchorage School District jazz bands. But often it is not that easy.

“What do you do with 50,000 shark fins?” he wondered.

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This story was first published by . Alaska Public Media Distributed through partnership with The Associated Press.