It was at age 15, though, that she found her true calling. On a 1981 visit to Monte Ciccia, near Messina, she watched helplessly as poachers shooting from cement bunkers unleashed their fire on the hundreds of honey buzzards, hawks and other birds that were migrating over the narrow straits separating Sicily from the Italian mainland. After seeing 17 birds shot out of the sky, she vowed that "this was the beginning of the end for the poachers."

Easier said than done. In the macho culture of Sicily and Calabria, just across the straits, there was a long tradition of hunting migrating raptors. Local superstition held that any man who did not kill at least one honey buzzard each year would be cuckolded. So when this earnest young lady began badgering police, forest rangers and local authorities to do something about the illegal killing, she was not taken seriously. But she persisted and began organizing camps of young people who would gather each spring to observe the migrations and inform police when they saw poachers at work.

The hunters retaliated with threats and intimidation. They firebombed Giordano's car in 1986, and later broke into her house and mailed her a dead falcon with a note that said, "Your courage will cost you dearly." Those incidents, and another one in which monitors were shot at, finally got the law- enforcement officers on Giordano's side. "It made the police understand that poaching wasn't just a joke, and made them start helping us track down the poachers."

Once local authorities started cooperating, Giordano's efforts paid off dramatically. Before she began monitoring the poachers, more than 5,000 supposedly protected birds — mostly honey buzzards, falcons, storks, orioles, kestrels and swallows — were slaughtered each year. Today the count averages 200. In 1984, observers around the Straits of Sicily counted 3,100 raptors flying over the area and heard 1,900 gunshots during the April and May migrating season. In 1995, 25,000 birds passed over the same locations and only 30 shots were heard. On a recent tour of salt-water lakes on the outskirts of Messina, Giordano proudly pointed to the dozens of cormorants perched on wooden posts in the shallow water. "Twenty years ago," she says, "you would not have seen even one cormorant here. People used to shoot at them from the street."

Over the years, Giordano, now 35, turned her passion into a profession: she studied ornithology and a degree in natural sciences from the University of Messina in 1989. In 1998, her anti-poaching crusade earned her the prestigious Goldman Prize for environmental activism. Far from considering herself a hero, though, she claims she just did what came naturally. "If you witness something that is wrong, you can't close your eyes and turn your head," she says. "Your energy comes from the conviction that life is a treasure nobody should destroy. Your will becomes the only thing that can turn that hope into reality."

Today Giordano runs the World Wildlife Fund's Natural Saltwater Reserve in Paceco, Italy. She also shuttles to Messina, where her family and boyfriend live, and where she runs a WWF Center for the Rehabilitation of Wild Animals. In addition to caring for injured birds, Giordano and her colleagues have taken to rescuing sea turtles, about 25 of which drift onto the shore each year with fish hooks lodged in their throats or stomachs. "They have not eaten in weeks," she says, "and after you operate sometimes they need a long time to recuperate."

The center's aviary houses some two dozen falcons and buzzards in various stages of convalescence. "That one will never fly again," she says, pointing to a wounded honey buzzard. Perched in another cage, a small falcon known as a hobby is also grounded for life. "He has a broken bone that can't be healed," she explains. The disabled birds, who collectively consume six kilos of meat each day, have a home for life, and those who recover are turned loose. "They can't say thanks," says Giordano, "but the best thanks is watching them fly free again."