Two in court for smuggling rare orchids

By PATRICK GOWER


New Zealand's first alleged orchid thieves have been arrested.

Two Czech men have been charged with stealing rare native orchids from national parks and smuggling them out of the country.

They were arrested on Sunday by the Wildlife Enforcement Group, a multi-agency team responsible for investigating the smuggling of plants and animals.

The group will not say where the two were arrested, how they were smuggling the orchids or the type and quantity of specimens they are alleged to have taken.

The men appeared in the Manukau District Court yesterday and were released on bail without entering a plea to appear again this week.

They face charges under the Trade in Endangered Species Act 1989 and the National Parks Act 1980.

A network of about 150 New Zealand orchid lovers has been on the alert since before Christmas.

Dr Ian St George, convener of the New Zealand Native Orchid Group, said word went out on their "amateur grapevine" about a suspicious pair of orchid hunters who had been asking to be guided to the flowers.

Members were asked not to assist them.

The pursuit of orchids is an international phenomenon popularised in the movie Adaptation and the best-selling book The Orchid Thief, based on orchid hunter John La Roche.

The Wildlife Enforcement Group includes staff from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Department of Conservation and Customs. It has caught people smuggling native beetles, geckos and parrot eggs.

The group represented New Zealand at an Interpol conference last year, where it said a booming international trade in orchids had led to an increase in their being smuggled out of the country.

New Zealand's orchid enthusiasts say it is the first time anyone has been caught.

Dr St George said New Zealand had about 150 native orchids, including about 20 that were "vanishingly rare".

One, known as Corybas or Anzybas carsei, could be found only in one Waikato swamp, which he refused to name.

Known as the swamp helmet, it is about the size of a fingernail, dark maroon and Dr St George describes it as "the closet we have to an All Black orchid".

Only one man knew the way through waist-deep bog to it, and it was in flower for only two weeks of the year, in September.

He had not seen it, and it has been rarely photographed.

Orchids reportedly fetch up to $24,000 on the international black market. Demand comes from private botanical collections in Japan, Germany and the West Coast of America.

One of the most famous orchid robberies was in September 2001 when a bog orchid was stolen from a British nature reserve. The rare 5cm-high plant, taken from a secret site in Norfolk, was believed to be worth up to $17,000.

Dr St George said knowing what type of orchids the men had allegedly smuggled would help tell whether they had received local help.

He would be "absolutely disgusted" if they had.

A Wellington GP, Dr St George has been hunting orchids for 25 years. He has written a book on orchids, travelled to 10 countries to see them and is editor of a quarterly journal.

He said orchids were a flagship group of organisms for which human interest "unfortunately reaches its zenith in weird people who collect very rare things".

"They are extraordinarily beautiful and have a mystique that goes back for centuries."

Fanatics in grip of botanical gold fever

Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever.

In those days, wealthy fanatics would send explorers to unmapped territories in search of new varieties.

Now orchid-lovers compare its addiction to that of a drug.

Even though the orchid family has grown to more than 60,000 species and 100,000 hybrids, human passion for them still inspires theft.

Its pursuit has been popularised in New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's best-selling book The Orchid Thief about American orchid hunter John La Roche. It became the basis for the movie Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep.

Explorer Eric Hansen led an expedition into the jungles of Borneo in 1993 to find the world's rarest orchid and wrote Orchid Madness, which he called "a tale of love, lust and lunacy".

Though orchid smuggling is a practice that has been tacitly accepted for more than a century, the number of prosecutions worldwide is growing, including an American botanical garden centre.

As Norman McDonald wrote in his 1939 book The Orchid Hunters: "When a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine, it's a sort of madness."