(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — A tweet from the Cook County Forest Preserves asks: “Would you steal a meal from a butterfly?”
The tweet’s objective is to stop people from picking flowers, but the issue goes way beyond just flower-pickers.
What the Forest Preserve really wants to stop is what they call “professional poachers.”
“And these people know what they’re doing. They know how to avoid our police. They know how to avoid our staff,” John McCabe, director of the agency’s department of resource management, said Monday.
He explains: “We have situations where we have a parking lot and they park in a neighborhood across the street and walk in. Or, they have a friend or an accomplice that drops them off on the side of the road and then that person calls them on the phone and comes and picks them up on the side of the road. So, it looks like maybe they were changing a flat tire or something.
“But they’re coming out with a 55-gallon plastic garbage bag full of 40 pounds worth of leeks.”
Leeks or mushrooms or fiddleheads that the poachers sell to restaurants, all illegal.
“We’ve actually seen locations where multiple plants have been removed. And it sort of looks like a moon crater sort of situation,” McCabe said.
Cracking down on visitors who pick a pretty flower is not a big priority to the forest preserves system. But they don’t want that, either, McCabe said.
That means less food for birds and insects. And it’s against the law.