Three Alaska guides and a group of Outside hunters and taxidermists have been indicted on federal charges of illegally killing and transporting exotic and endangered birds.

Summons and search and seizure warrants were executed in 15 states this week. U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials seized three boats, documents, photographs and dozens of frozen and mounted bird carcasses, including ducks, bald eagles, owls and rare song birds.

The birds are highly valued by a select group of collectors when they are stuffed and mounted. Collectors will pay top dollar for a pair of mounted rare or endangered birds, said John Gavitt, Fish and Wildlife assistant regional director. For example, a pair of spectacled eiders, listed as a threatened species in 1993, might be worth up to $3,500, he said.

Fish and Wildlife officials began an undercover investigation in 1991 into the illegal hunting of Steller's eiders, king eiders, common eiders, harlequin ducks, old squaw ducks and spectacled eiders.

Taxidermists Garrett Senk of Wisconsin and Joe Segler of Michigan, along with hunters Clifford Johnson of Wisconsin and Michael Guest of Michigan, and guides Paul Chervenak and Lloyd Devoe Friend of Kodiak and Vernon Slowooko Jr. of Gambell were indicted on several felony and misdemeanor violations of the Lacey Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act.

They are suspected of exceeding legal bag limits and illegally killing a variety of ducks in the Kodiak and Gambell areas between 1991 and 1994. In one instance, when it was still legal to hunt spectacled eiders, Senk and Johnson allegedly killed 67, well over the limit at the time of 15, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

In other cases, the guides were cited for allegedly placing the hunters on shore and then driving the birds toward the hunters. They also allegedly hunted ducks while their boat was still operating under power, sometimes approaching fleeing waterfowl at a high rate of speed then allowing the hunters to shoot from the speeding boat. The Migratory Bird Treat Act prohibits both types of hunting practices.

Slowooko is a well-known figure in the St. Lawrence Island village of Gambell. Over the years, he has earned his living largely as a hunter supplying walrus ivory for the community's famous carvers.  He pioneered the use of aluminum boats for hunting in the Bering Sea, but almost died in one in 1988. He was given up for dead after being lost at sea with six others for more than two weeks. They eventually made their way back to the island, where they were rescued. Slowooko was largely credited with getting the group back to the island in the face of overwhelming odds.

The federal grand jury returned the indictments on Aug. 10, but they were sealed until August 24, when the suspects were found and served summons to appear in federal court on Sept. 21. The investigation is still under way, Gavitt said.

Update 11/11/95:  Five years ago, a burly Wisconsin taxidermist named Garrett Senk and his friend Cliff Johnson flew to the remote village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island for a week of bird hunting.

They came that chilly October mainly to kill spectacled eiders -- an exotic and distinctively marked sea duck found in Western Alaska and the Siberian Arctic.

Their hunt started out with a bang.  ''. . . Yah, this is the first day and we only got 67 . . . ,'' Senk said on a videotape made by a local guide, Vernon Slwooko Jr. The combined limit for the two nonresident hunters was 30 a day, 60 in all.

Though windy weather hampered many days of their hunt, just before they packed their bags for home, Senk said in the videotape, ''. . . That's 100 even, spectacled eiders.''

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service agents calculate the two hunters actually left the state with ''135 to 165 spectacled eider skins in their luggage,'' according to documents in a case pending in federal court.

In Wisconsin, agents would later find Senk's freezer filled with dozens of bird skins -- burrowing parrots, hooded mergansers, an Egyptian goose, wood ducks, eiders, pintails, scaup, harlequin ducks and more. Johnson's stuffed collection included all the North American ducks. As the probe stretched across 15 states, agents would find a Louisiana taxidermist's freezer stuffed with 600 skins.

The investigation led to August indictments of eight hunters and guides, including Senk, on charges of illegally hunting migratory birds. The videotape from the Gambell hunt and videos from bird hunts a few years later on Kodiak Island are key evidence against Senk and the others accused of targeting Alaska seabirds.

''These people are skin hunters,'' a federal prosecutor told a federal judge when Senk appeared in a Wisconsin court in 1992 on an unrelated hunting violation in Canada. ''They're not meat hunters. They want to mount the skins.''  Collecting skins of birds from around the world is their hobby. It is perfectly legal unless the species is endangered, or the bird is taken illegally or killed for sale or trade. Commercial trafficking in bird skins is prohibited by federal law.

Federal investigators targeted Senk, 44, Johnson, 66, and a handful of other collectors and guides when they launched an undercover investigation in 1991 called Operation Eider.  ''The investigation's purpose was twofold,'' said Steve Skrocki, an assistant U.S. attorney. ''The first was to inform the guiding community that these violations had occurred and we were aware of it. And the second was to investigate and charge those hunters and taxidermists responsible for the most aggression.''

Some consider Senk one of the nation's best taxidermists. He has won recognition for his ability to mount lifelike birds and fish. His wife, Wendy, is a taxidermist for the Milwaukee County Museum. Both have won national and international awards for their work.

Reached at his Wisconsin home, Senk said he did not want to comment.

Senk's attorney contends that when he pleaded guilty in 1992 to illegally taking a caribou in Canada, federal agents agreed not to pursue charges in the Gambell hunt.

''We have motions to dismiss pending,'' said Wayne Anthony Ross, an Anchorage attorney representing Senk. ''The U.S. attorney up here doesn't want to abide by the agreement that the U.S. attorney made in Wisconsin.''

Skrocki, however, said that federal officials didn't learn of illegal hunting in Gambell until they saw unedited videotapes of the 1990 hunt.

Federal officials decided to look into skin hunting in Alaska after agents began noticing an unusual number of stuffed spectacled eiders and other sea ducks at taxidermy shows throughout the United States.  ''These things started showing up -- old squaws, eiders -- obviously things you don't get in the Lower 48,'' said Jim Sheridan, special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.  ''There weren't that many people coming up here regularly to hunt those birds, but we were seeing 30 of these in a contest.

''You have the legitimate hunters, then you have the people who take it to the extreme,'' Sheridan said. ''The ones who were the biggest problems were not the trophy hunters, the guys coming up to add to their collection. The problem was the taxidermists who got into killing large numbers of birds, then started trading with people.''

Larry Blomquist, a past president of the National Taxidermist Association and publisher of a taxidermy magazine, said, ''Certainly this shouldn't be a black eye on taxidermists. Ninety-nine percent are very law-abiding.

''We definitely believe in wildlife laws,'' he added. ''That is what this profession depends on. We don't want taxidermists or taxidermy to be looked at wrongly because of the wrongdoing of some.''

Psychologists who have studied hunters have found that there is sometimes a passage that starts with a kid who wants to see how good he is by shooting at a target. This progresses to gathering food for the table and, in some cases, to art -- the collector.

The duck collector ''is eventually going to end up in Alaska because we have some species not found anywhere else,'' Sheridan added.

Those include the rare spectacled eider. Six months after Senk's 1990 hunt, a retired federal biologist, who had watched the numbers of spectacled eiders diminish, petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list the species as threatened. The bird was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1993.

Investigators made their first arrest under Operation Eider at Anchorage International Airport in January 1992 when they stopped a Texas man, Bruce Steven Owens. Or at least that's what investigators thought his name was.

Owens, an expert kick boxer, was headed home from a hunting trip on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs.

''There was a knock-down, drag-out fight,'' Sheridan said. Agents seized a videotape and bird skins. Owens agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of unlawful possession of migratory birds and possession of untagged migratory birds. He was sentenced to one year in prison and fined $1,200.

Not until three months after Owens' arrest, however, did agents discover Owens was really Steven Gerald Pogue -- a fugitive running from 1979 rape and sodomy charges in Missouri.

While behind bars, Sheridan said, Pogue provided names of others trafficking in bird skins. One of them was Garrett Senk . Pogue told investigators that Senk and a guy named ''Cliff'' hunted with guide Slwooko in Gambell in 1990 and videotaped their hunt.

''Senk was one of the better-known collectors,'' Sheridan said. ''Almost everyone (in the collecting business) knows Senk.''

THE VIDEOS Senk's name surfaced again in the spring of 1992, when investigators started looking at a buddy of his for unrelated hunting violations in the United States, Canada and Mexico. During the search of the man's home, investigators found a videotape that implicated Senk in illegal hunts in British Columbia.

That July, investigators searched Senk's house in Hales Corners, a suburb of Milwaukee. They seized eight videos, including one of a 1990 hunt in British Columbia. The Milwaukee County Public Museum had paid $3,500 toward the hunt so Senk's wife, Wendy, could kill a caribou for the museum's collection.

She never shot a caribou, however. Instead, her husband, who didn't have a license, shot it for her.

During the hunt, Garrett Senk left the meat of moose, caribou and mountain goat to rot, in violation of the law, shot upland birds without a license, fished without a license, and caught more than his limit of trout besides, according to a pre-sentence investigation report filed in federal court in Milwaukee in 1993. The Senks salvaged only the shoulder and heads of the moose, caribou and goat, for mounts.

Garrett Senk was charged in federal court with bringing an illegally taken caribou into the United States. Had the statute of limitations not run out, Canadian officials would have charged him with hunting big game and upland birds without a license and wasting meat, according to the report.

One of his hunting partners, Curt Meitz, the city attorney for Waukesha, Wis., wrote a letter to the court on Senk's behalf. Meitz said that while Senk collected a number of bird skins, he did so only to make gifts.

''I have never seen Mr. Senk engage in trading, selling or bartering of any specimens he has collected,'' Meitz wrote.

In June 1993, Senk agreed to a plea bargain that required him to pay a $5,000 fine and $1,500 in restitution to the Canadian Wildlife Fund. He was also placed on three years' probation and lost his hunting and fishing privileges for that time.

Meanwhile, investigators continued to look at the videotapes, which included Senk's annual hunting trips to Kodiak Island between 1987 and 1991, the 1990 Gambell hunt, and a 1988 duck hunt in Massachusetts.

They also decided to send agents undercover on hunts on Kodiak Island in 1993 and 1994. During those hunts, agents witnessed violations. They reportedly saw, and got on videotape, the guides and hunters shooting birds while their boat motors were still running, and spooking, or rallying, the birds, then shooting them.

That led to the indictments of Michael Guest, 21, of Wayne, Mich.; Joseph Segler, a 35-year-old taxidermist from Garden City, Mich.; Lloyd Devoe Friend, a 59-year-old guide from Kodiak; and Jeffrey A. Peterson, a 31-year-old guide from Old Harbor.

Also indicted was Kodiak guide Paul Chervenak, 38. But charges against him were dropped last week pending further investigation, according to Skrocki.

Guest, Segler, Friend and Peterson have tentatively reached out-of-court plea agreements. In exchange for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of motoring while hunting, other charges including exceeding bag limits were dropped. Each agreed to accept a sentence that prohibits hunting for a year, requires them to forfeit their shotguns and the ducks they killed, cooperate with investigators, and pay fines ranging from $500 to $2,000.

Segler and Friend's attorneys admit their clients shot from moving boats, but deny they shot over bag limits. Segler ''is terribly embarrassed,'' said his attorney, Sidney Billingsea. ''It is basically his first and only criminal conviction of any sort.''

Indicted in the Gambell hunt were Slwooko, Johnson and Senk.

The 46-year-old Slwooko reached an out-of-court plea agreement that is under seal. Slwooko said he is guilty of taking over the bag limit in that 1990 hunt, but not the other charges, which included conspiring to kill ducks with the intent to sell them.

''At that time, I didn't know the bag limit,'' Slwooko said. ''We had real good luck. In the fun and excitement, we just went over the limit. . . . I was more or less a guide with no knowledge.''

''They are making a little too much of this case,'' he added, because there simply aren't that many duck hunters that make it out to Gambell, where the cost is high and conditions are adverse. Also, ''we have been trying to tell them the (spectacled) eiders never have been threatened. We have firsthand knowledge from when they migrate through here.''

Johnson and Senk have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go to trial in February.

''I can't tell you too much because it's going to trial,'' said Johnson, who is charged with shooting over the bag limit. ''I did not take over the bag limit.''

Senk attorney Wayne Anthony Ross said too much has been made of the videos.

They are simply ''bragging videos,'' Ross said. The ducks in the videos represented what a number of hunters shot over a number of days, not just one hunter's take.

''They were apparently, shall we say, bragging and trying to make the guys back home feel envious, and it backfired,'' he said.

The government is wasting time going after Senk, Ross said. ''Why go after a guy they have already nailed? If you get hauled in federal court like he did in Wisconsin. . . . You bet it got his attention. He hasn't hunted or fished since. He got a big message in 1992.''

Update 10/5/96:  The last two duck hunters charged in a five-year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation called Operation Eider were sentenced in federal court this week.

Garrett Senk and Cliff Johnson of Wisconsin pleaded guilty to misdemeanor violations of shooting too many spectacled eiders. Senk was fined $500 and handed two months' probation, with four months of home confinement with electronic monitoring. Johnson was fined $5,000 and placed on two years' probation. Neither can hunt or possess guns while on probation.

''This was a political case brought by a (federal) administration that I believe is anti-hunting,'' said Wayne Anthony Ross, who represented Senk. ''I estimate the government spent several million dollars on this Operation Eider . . . and it was a total waste of funds, in my opinion.''

Ross said the two agreed to plead to the misdemeanor charges because the government ''so excessively overcharged these people that their attorneys fees were in excess of $60,000 each.''

The undercover investigation targeted a group of hunters and guides that federal agents believed were ''skin hunters,'' that is, hunters and taxidermists who collect skins of birds from around the world and then stuff them for display. It's a legal practice unless the species is endangered or the bird is taken illegally. Commercial trafficking in bird skins is prohibited by federal law.

The two Wisconsin duck hunters were among 12 who were indicted on Lacy Act violations as part of the investigation. Nine pleaded guilty to misdemeanor Lacy Act Violations. Most were fined $500 to $5,000. None was sentenced to jail, but all were placed on probation. Some lost their hunting privileges for the period of their probation.

Charges against two -- Frank Enstminger of Tok and Alabama taxidermist Brian Wallace -- were dropped. A plea agreement is in the works for Thomas Attaway, a Louisiana deputy U.S. marshal.

Assistant U.S. attorney Steve Skrocki said the prosecution of the skin collectors was important because a message needed to be sent that violations for exceeding bag limits are taken very seriously in this state.

Spectacled eiders are a distinctively marked sea duck found in Western Alaska and the Siberian Arctic. The rare birds were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1993. At the time of Johnson's and Senk's 1990 hunt, it was legal to shoot spectacled eiders.

The investigation started in 1991 when federal agents began noticing an unusual number of stuffed spectacled eiders and other sea ducks at taxidermy shows throughout the United States. Investigators made their first arrest in early 1992 when they stopped a Texas bird hunter as he was leaving Alaska after taking more than his limit of sea ducks on St. Lawrence Island. After he was sentenced, the Texan provided names of others, including Senk and Johnson, who were reportedly trafficking in bird skins and who had been involved in an illegal hunt on St. Lawrence island in 1990.

Some consider Senk one of the nation's best taxidermists. He has won recognition for his ability to mount life-like birds and fish. His wife, Wendy, is a taxidermist for the Milwaukee County Museum. Both have won national and international awards for their work.

At the same time, other investigators were looking at allegations that Senk had been involved in illegal hunts in Canada and Mexico after the St. Lawrence Island bird hunt. As part of the Canada allegations, investigators seized eight videos during a search of Senk's home in Hale's Corners, a suburb of Milwaukee.

In June 1993, Senk agreed to a plea bargain that required him to pay a $5,000 fine and $1,500 in restitution to the Canadian Wildlife Fund. He lost his hunting and fishing privileges for three years.

Reference:

Anchorage Daily News