The truck with 120,000 birds was not the only one; they were the ones who got caught.

Alexandra Tadic, Association for Wild Bird Protection

Yugoslav bird protection agencies say poachers - most of them from Italy - and rare bird collectors are heading for Serbia and Montenegro because laws are lax and officials easy to bribe.

In the most recent case involving Italian poachers, a car with 82 birds killed on Yugoslav territory was stopped on the Serbian-Hungarian border by Hungarian customs officials.

Ten of the birds were protected species, hidden in a secret compartment in the door. But this was just the tip of an iceberg.

Bribes

According to Alexandra Tadic, from the Yugoslav Association for Wild Bird Protection, foreign poachers are able to bypass hunting restrictions by bribing forestry and customs officials.

Collectors target rare species like the corncrake

"This is a country where you do anything and no one will stop you," she said.

Ms Tadic said the crisis reached stratospheric proportions late last year when a truck containing 120,000 birds killed in Serbia and Montenegro was stopped by Italian forestry officials.

The haul included 40,000 quail and 10,000 skylark. There were also hundreds of song birds and dozens of rare and endangered species like the corncrake.

Extinction fears

"The truck with 120,000 birds was not the only one; they were the ones who got caught.

"Where hunting goes on, they pay a bribe to a forestry man, or someone working there and then he allows them to do what they like. And they have connections to domestic criminals and they can order what they want, killed or alive or whatever they want," Ms Tadic said.

According to the association, Yugoslavia has also become a haven for collectors and a hub for the sale and transportation of exotic birds and birds of prey.

It says government officials take only slight interest. But, the association says, time is running out. If the decline continues unchecked, whole species will be wiped out.