As happens too often in this day and age, an intended good deed leads to headaches and troubles.
An 11-year-old Virginia animal lover stepped in to save a bird from turning into a cat snack in her father’s backyard. The rescued feathered friend turned out to be a baby woodpecker, not a fortune-telling dove. Skylar Capo brought the young bird to her mother Alison Capo, who put it in a cage. Unlike a pair of reunited injured eagles, the woodpecker could not be returned to its mother, so Capo was going to keep an eye on it at her house before releasing it back into the wild.
The mother-and-daughter rescue team had to make a stop on the way back home. Knowing leaving the bird inside the vehicle would be a death sentence due to the high summer temperatures, the Capos carried the cage with them inside the store. In a random encounter, the family ran into a federal wildlife agent who spotted the caged woodpecker.
Unbeknownst to the Capos, transporting a baby woodpecker violates of the Federal Migratory Birds Act, and the agent came up to them in the store and alerted them to their error. As soon as the family arrived home, they opened the cage and the freed bird flew away.
The saga didn’t end there though, as a couple of weeks later, the family got a visit from the original agent they encountered and a state trooper who came to their front door to serve Alison Capo with a citation. Skylar’s mom refused to accept it, but the mailman later delivered it to her along with a $535 citation.
Once the story went public, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a statement that the citation they originally issued was not meant to be mailed. After the visit to the home, the officer determined the Capos no longer possessed the woodpecker and never intended to keep it captive and therefore didn’t need to be cited.
This was one caged bird whose “song” turned into a nightmare for a nature-loving family and a P.R. nightmare for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
