Why Is Everyone Stealing Parrots?
On a recent weeknight in Punta Gorda, Florida, a bird thief cut the power at a strip mall. 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. “They knew how to grab ’em, that’s for sure,” says Susan Jennings, the society’s executive director and a former police officer. “They knew what they wanted, and they came and took it.”
As 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. By 3 o’clock, they’d snagged Emerald and Jade, who shared a cage, and also Paco, Sammy, Maxine, Paco II, and Whiteboy. 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. 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. “There’s no rhyme or reason that we can figure out,” she said. “We don’t get it.”
Whatever the motive, Jennings told me, incidents like these are not unusual. Just last year, she said, someone smashed the front window of a pet store in Fort Myers and made off with
