Staging Bird Murders to Save a Species

The chatty green parrots had a front-row seat to a spine-chilling show. Tethered to a tree branch not far from their cage, another parrot, similar in appearance but of a different species, was armored in a small leather vest. As the green parrots looked on, a man approached the lone parrot with yet another bird leashed to his arm: a red-tailed hawk. The hawk lunged at the parrot in the vest, wrapping its talons around it. The parrot screamed, a sound only made when death is imminent. Satisfied, the man pulled the hawk off.

This simulated attack—don’t worry, the parrot was unscathed thanks to the vest—was a ruse, aimed at about to be released into the wild for the first time. A critically endangered species found nowhere else in the world, those chatty green birds