The pandemic increased demand for many kinds of pets. She also wouldn’t tell me where she lives giving out that information would be like painting targets on her parrots’ beaks!) “In reality anyone that owns a pet bird is not safe.” (Giuliani, who keeps seven parrots at her home, told me that she has cameras and a German shepherd for protection. “Rescues felt they were safe,” Silva wrote. Breeders have responded by adding cameras and guard dogs but thefts are rampant nonetheless. “Bird thefts have been occurring forever,” he said, “but during the PANDEMIC the number of thefts spiked.” As he sees it, the loneliness and boredom of 2020 caused a surge of interest in birds and aviculture, which in turn produced a booming market and inspired crime. When I reached out to Silva, he was in Dubai, in meetings for his day job at a fuel-logistics company, and could only respond by text and email. She said that he’s also been targeted by parrot thieves. Giuliani put me in touch with Tony Silva, a parrot breeder based in Homestead, Florida, who has written many books on birds and bird husbandry, and gives lectures all around the world. Parrot theft “ is happening more,” she told me, because “the prices are going up.”Īs usual, COVID is a factor. She bought a golden conure not that long ago for $3,500 today, the same bird would go for $4,500. Especially these days, says Lynda Giuliani, the South Florida coordinator for the American Federation of Aviculture. If a stolen parrot could fetch just a fraction of that market price, it might still return enough to make the crime worthwhile. These birds are almost certainly stolen in order to be sold: Some varieties of parrots, raised carefully and socialized, are worth thousands of dollars. The Punta Gorda heist falls in the clade of bigger scores, like the loss of 50 parrots from a macaw sanctuary in Carnation, Washington, or the robbery of $150,000 worth of parrots from a backyard in Fort Myers. “It’s as if they’ve got fed up with the parakeet and swapped it for my African Grey parrot,” that particular victim told reporters at the time. And when someone takes away your bird, they might decide to leave a smaller one behind. If men with guns can steal a parrot from your patio, a pregnant woman with a stroller might steal one from your boat. If one bird-napping crew shows up, incognito, in dark clothes and a black sedan, another will pretend to be your neighbors-and make their getaway in a horse-drawn carriage.
Who would ever steal a parrot, and why, and how, and … what? Parrots comprise some 350 different species, and according to my notes, parrot thieves are equally diverse. In fact, it’s a weirdly common crime-and also, commonly, a weird one. After a decade’s worth of monitoring this feed, I can confirm that parrot-napping is indeed a common crime throughout the English-speaking world. My Google Alert for stolen parrot, which I set up in the early 2010s, has delivered a long and steady run of colorful reports: small-time parrot robberies and major parrot heists planned-out parrot capers and cage-smash parrot grabs parrot thefts of passion, parrot thefts of vengeance, and parrot thefts of odd compulsion. Not as a journalist, exactly more like a hobbyist, a birder counting species of bird-related larceny. And aviculturists are taking notice.Īs it happens, I’ve been tracking this phenomenon for years. Parrot pirates have long been a threat to bird sellers and collectors-but Jennings thinks crime is on the rise in the community. Just last year, she said, someone smashed the front window of a pet store in Fort Myers and made off with all the birds she’s also heard that an Orlando store got hit. Whatever the motive, Jennings told me, incidents like these are not unusual. “There’s no rhyme or reason that we can figure out,” she said. In all, 28 birds were taken that night, Jennings told me, including two with missing appendages, one with balance problems, and another being watched for prolapse. They birdnapped Kori, who can whinny like a horse and Nakita, who can say “Oh my God” and “I’m sorry” and also Birdie Bird, who is elderly. By 3 o’clock, they’d snagged Emerald and Jade, who shared a cage, and also Paco, Sammy, Maxine, Paco II, and Whiteboy. “They knew what they wanted, and they came and took it.”Īs Jennings tells it, the thief, or thieves, walked right past the macaws-the Society’s highest-valued birds-to get to the smaller conures and Amazons.
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“They knew how to grab ’em, that’s for sure,” says Susan Jennings, the society’s executive director and a former police officer. It was roughly 2 a.m., a time when cockatoos and cockatiels are asleep and also when, with its security cameras knocked offline, one might slip inside the coral-stucco storefront of the Parrot Outreach Society, a local rescue-and-adoption group with close to 100 animals on-site. On a recent weeknight in Punta Gorda, Florida, a bird thief cut the power at a strip mall.
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