A Taiwanese man could face 20 years in jail for attempting to smuggle parrot eggs found hatching in his bag at a Miami airport.
Szu Ta Wu was changing flights after arriving from Nicaragua when a Border Protection officer noticed a faint chirping sound coming from his bag.
Officers stopped Wu at the checkpoint and found a tiny featherless bird that had just hatched.
Twenty-nine eggs were also found in a temperature-controlled cooler inside the bag.
The officer office seized the bag and rushed the eggs to an incubator in the airport aviary to try and to save them.
By then, eight of the birds had already hatched or were in the process of hatching.
Wu was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling birds into the US.
He faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on August 1.
Wu told investigators a friend paid him to travel from Taiwan to Nicaragua to pick up the eggs.
He denied knowing what kind of birds they were.
DNA samples of the eggshells showed they were yellow-naped Amazon and red-lored Amazon parrots.
The 24 surviving birds are now nine weeks old and being cared for by the Rare Specifies Conservatory Foundation based in Florida.
"They are hand-raised babies," foundation director Dr Paul Reillo said.
"They've never seen Mom and Dad, they've been raised by us since they hatched."
A round-the-clock effort to care for the birds includes five hand-feedings a day in a room filled with large cages.
They are almost fully feathered now and the staff has started transitioning them from a special formula to a diet of food pellets and fruit.
Dr Reillo said the bird trafficking industry out of Central America was well-established and had been going on for years.
AP/ABC
