Bird Smuggling

Whilst coming home from St Thomas last week, I had to go through Customs. The thing I found interesting was that they made quite a big deal about bird smuggling. I was asked about it by a Customs official and there were several posters and notices hanging on the walls warning against it. Apparantly, approximately 25,000 birds are smuggling in every year. My question is, how? that is A LOT of birds.
So, it got me thinking, I would never smuggle a bird, I have no need to. BUT, I was thinking, and I don't have any suitcases capable of smuggling birds. Plus, they search every bag and carry on, so you'd have to have some type of hidden contraption that would keep the bird from showing up on x-rays or from being visible in a search. Plus, you can't carry it on, it'd chirp the whole flight. Surely, that would tip someone off. How do you get the bird to be quiet during security checks? I wouldn't even have the know how. That many birds coming into the US, it has to be through non-commercials flights or something, cause I don't see TSA missing something like that these days.
In discussing this back on the mainland with Jeni though, she suggested that you "trank" (short for tranquilize) the bird and then you could carry it with you, like duct taped to your body or something. Not if you were beside the fat guy I was beside was my initial thought, but then as I pondered it more, I wondered how she knew so much about bird smuggling all the sudden. She even knew the lingo, like "trank" and "concealed bird". So then we had to have a talk about that. Boys and girls, I should warn you, if you are going to get married, always remember to have "the talk" about all your partners priors, bird smuggling expeditions that is. You don't want to get two years in and discover you are married to an international bird smuggler. In my case, Jeni claims she isn't Senorita Pájara or the infamous "Bird Lady", and still claims she has never been to St Thomas, but we don't have any vacation plans there anytime soon.
I still have my doubts about the ability to do it on a commercial flight or why you would even want to (maybe Greenville just doesn't have the bird black market that other cities do), but whatever. I know I wanted to suffocate a couple of birds outside my hotel window for making too much racket at 6 am, but smuggling them was not on my mind.