"POACHING OVERVIEW"

BYLINE: Traci Watson When most people visit a national park or national forest, they take only photos. Others, however, take the scenery -- the ferns, the butterflies, the trees, the shells, even the cactuses. Then they sell it. Thieves haunt America's federal land, from the jam-packed outdoor playgrounds run by the National Park Service to the isolated deserts overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Motivated by cravings for a quick buck and favorable odds that they won't be caught, thieves are stripping species from land owned and supported by taxpayers. And they are doing so at an alarming rate. Statistics are hard to come by, but federal law officers speak of cases involving hundreds of shellfish, tons of grass and dozens of 500-year-old cedar trees. (The trees are coveted for shingles and musical instruments.) Stealing animals and plants despoils the landscape and upsets the natural order. In some places, thieves are so industrious that they keep rare species from thriving. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, poaching of ginseng, a popular herbal remedy, is blamed for impeding the plant's recovery despite 60-plus years of protection. "If you've got it, they're stealing it," says John Garrison, a law-enforcement officer for the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina. "Human beings are motivated by a few things. Greed is one of them." Consumers may unwittingly purchase the stolen goods, officials say. "When you buy plants at the supermarket and they have little green moss in the bottom, that's where it's coming from -- parks and forests in the Pacific Northwest," says Todd Swain, a Park Service special agent. "They go out and literally strip-mine huge areas of moss and load it up on trucks." Federal agents say that while the precise scope of the pillage is unknown, it's likely that only a small percentage of perpetrators are caught. Recent cases illustrate how much damage thieves can do: * Barrel cactus. From 1991 through 1997, poachers stole 15,000 barrel cactuses from federal land throughout southern California, including Mojave National Preserve, authorities say. Members of the "cactus cartel" would kick over a cactus, then, wearing gloves and leather aprons, place it in a cardboard box and lift it into a pickup with blacked-out windows. They sold it to makers of biznaga, a Mexican candy. Officials are hoping to indict seven men for the crimes; two already have been convicted. * Black bears. Earlier this year, after a months-long special investigation, 10 people were convicted of hunting bears in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park. Several were tied to a large regional bear-poaching ring that supplied bear gall bladders and paws to markets in Washington, D.C., and beyond. Paws are made into a soup that sells for hundreds of dollars a bowl overseas. Bladders, dried and ground, are a traditional Asian medicine. * Bear grass. Earlier this year, a federal grand jury returned a 16-count indictment against a man who hired a crew of workers to tear bear grass, used in floral arrangements, from Willamette National Forest in Oregon. Over five months in 1999, the workers harvested 110 tons of the grass, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, officials say. Thefts are being driven by factors such as the explosive growth of Las Vegas, Phoenix and other Southwestern cities. As people pour into the region, demand for desert plants -- from the ocotillo shrub to the Joshua tree -- has boomed, as contractors landscape the yards of newly built homes. Rising interest in non-traditional medicine helps encourage poaching of black cohosh, taken for menopause symptoms. And as American eating habits move beyond burgers and fries, there's greater demand for morels and other gourmet mushrooms that thrive in the damp forests of the Pacific Northwest. To some extent, the strict rules meant to protect species on federal land might have backfired: The animals and plants living on public property are often bigger, healthier and more common than elsewhere, making them especially coveted by light-fingered crooks. Sea sponges, for example, are more numerous and of higher quality inside Florida's Biscayne National Park than elsewhere. That seems to have been the draw for two fishermen who pried 850 sponges from their habitat in the park over a three-year period. In February, they were barred from the park for life, and some of their equipment was confiscated. Federal law-enforcement officers have trouble catching mercenary visitors because they must patrol vast stretches of land, sometimes millions of acres each. And wildlife doesn't have serial numbers, so officers usually have to apprehend thieves red-handed to have any hope of punishing them. But officials at Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada and Arizona are trying to get around that obstacle. They're implanting tiny tags in some plants, especially the biggest and showiest, that contain an ID code for that plant and its location. Now officers who see cactuses being trucked out of the park can check whether they're stolen goods. At $ 5 per plant, the system is costly. But, says park spokesman Bert Byers, it will "help us keep the desert in the desert."