XI'AN, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- Three men were jailed for shooting highly endangered red ibises in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, a local court ruled Friday.

The three men, all natives of southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, were accused of killing two red ibises with homemade guns in the woods of Liuba County in Hanzhong City on June 4, the county court said in a verdict handed down on Friday.

The defendants said they were hunting for fun and did not realize their prey were red ibises, even when they saw the hoops on their feet with codes reading K07 and K09. They took the dead birds away in a sack.

The endangered birds were coded by forestry workers who tracked their whereabouts for conservation purposes.

When told by friends the dead birds were red ibises, the three men deserted the gun and prey and fled back home to Chongqing. Two weeks later, they surrendered themselves to police.

One of them was sentenced to nine years and fined 5,000 yuan (784.5 U.S. dollars), while the other two received six years imprisonment with fines of 3,000 yuan each, according to the court ruling.

Xin Changyan, a judge with the county court, said the minimum jail term for illegal poaching of red ibis should be 10 years, but leniency was shown to these defendants because they had given themselves up to police.

The red ibis were widely found in China, Russia, the Korean Peninsula and Japan, but have been on the verge of extinction since the 1950s.

Chinese experts discovered seven wild red ibis in Yangxian County in Shaanxi in 1981, believed to be the only wild red ibis living in the world at that time.

Thanks to conservation and artificial breeding efforts, the red ibis population topped 2,000 last year, including about 500 artificially bred.