When I first arrived in Peru's Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve in 2005, a local youth surprised me with an offer to sell me a live owl, despite the fact that we were in a protected area where commercial hunting was prohibited. We set the owl free together, but this turned out to be an early lesson about the vulnerability of tropical protected areas to exploitation, even when laws and policies had been put in place to protect them. At that time, Allpahuayo-Mishana was a newly designated protected area with no paid staff except for its director, who was stationed in the nearby city of Iquitos.