This is not going to be a story with a happy ending.
It's about a major victim of the world's illegal wildlife trade - the parrot.
These brilliantly colored, intelligent birds, are so popular
as pets that around half of the estimated 100 million parrots in the world now
live in captivity, most of them in private homes.
Behind the colorful facade, there's a dark story, one that involves
corruption and the exploitation of loopholes in the law.
The thorny issue of captive breeding and a worrying rise in dubious online
parrot shopping sites.
The exotic pet trade has seen certain species poached to the brink of extinction.
And with up to 90% of wild caught parrots dying en route to the pet store,
this raises an obvious question:
Why can't parrot trafficking be stopped?
According to data collected by CITES, the global treaty that regulates wild animal and plant
trading, parrots account for roughly 90%
of the world's live bird trades.
Between 1975 and 2016,
16.7 million parrots were imported worldwide,
almost 400,000 a year on average.
And while many of the trades involved captive-bred birds,
which is accepted by law,
the illegal capture and sale of wild parrots remains a major problem.
Over that 40 year period, around 23% of the parrots traded have been taken from the wild,
and the true source of a further 37% was unknown.
When it comes to stealing parrots from their forest homes,
poachers leave a trail of destruction.
They use cruel trapping methods such as wire nets or glue covered branches
and sometimes felled trees to reach high nests,
destroying habitats even for the birds they don't manage to catch.
To prevent them escaping the parrots, flight feathers or hacked off,
and they're crammed into crates, plastic bags or even bottles.
With no access to light, food or air, they very often die on their long, terrifying journeys.
A recent study of African gray parrots, one of the world's most traded species,
found that between 30 and 60% of wild-caught birds didn't even survive to the point of export.
Other estimates put the mortality rate of trafficked parrots closer to 90%.
It's an immense and upsetting problem,
but parrot trafficking is not unknown.
Then why do so many birds keep dying?
For much of the 20th century,
North America and Western Europe were the main importers of parrots,
with a particular boom seen in the USA in the late 1980s.
Around this time, the U.S. imported hundreds of thousands of parrots every year,
as many as 150,000 of them illegally captured in Mexico.
But a recent review of parrot trading has shown
how trends have changed over the past four decades:
North America and Western Europe have dropped off rapidly, with countries
in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, replacing them as the top importers.
It's believed this has a lot to do with the introduction of legislation,
such as the Global Cities Treaty and the USA's Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992,
which limited or prohibited the import of exotic birds.
The legal crackdown seemed to take effect:
Nowadays, only around 9400 wild caught parrots are smuggled from Mexico to the U.S. each year.
But there's a catch:
This number accounts for just 4 to 14% of the parrots still captured annually in Mexico.
Just because fewer are being smuggled
across the border doesn't mean that fewer are being caught.
The sale of wild-caught parrots continues - just on a domestic level instead.
It's a similar story across Latin America, where a study conducted in 14 countries
found that 30% of parrot nests had been poached, equating to between
400,000 and 800,000 chicks taken every year.
Demand is high, as a legally registered captive-bred parrot
can cost around ten times as much as a wild-caught bird.
Countries like Brazil also treat wildlife trafficking crimes as minor offenses.
For poachers, it can be an easy and comparatively risk free way to make money.
The legislation governing international trades is stricter,
but wildlife traffickers still find ways to evade the law.
The rise of the Internet, particularly social media,
has played a massive role in this,
making it surprisingly easy to find and advertise endangered species
such as African gray parrots and white cockatoos.
For some people, buying from a dubious online source is a cheaper
alternative to paying for a bird from a registered breeder.
Captive bred birds are expensive.
At one retailer,
an African gray parrot was being sold for 1,400 USD,
while a Double yellow headed Amazon can cost up to 5500.
With numerous websites offering exotic birds for sale,
it's never been easier to purchase a parrot.
But prospective owners are faced with a problem:
Do they really know where their new pet is coming from?
The short answer is very often: No.
Recent investigations have shown that corruption and forged paperwork
have led to wild-caught animals, including parrots, being exported with fake documents
claiming they are captive-bred or even a different species.
Techniques like these are sometimes referred
to as wildlife "laundering" and, incredibly, can involve
not just parrots themselves, but even their eggs.
Poached from nests in countries like Brazil,
the eggs are smuggled into Europe to hatch.
The birds can then be sold under the label "Captive-Bred".
It's an astonishing legal loophole,
though recently a couple of high profile smugglers were caught and convicted in Europe.
Still, it indicates a wider problem in parrot trafficking:
the murky situation that surrounds the concept of captive breeding.
Although it is legal for registered breeders to sell exotic
birds as pets, even captive-bred birds have wild origins.
Some people argue that supplying the market with parrots bred to live in a cage
is not only cruel to the birds themselves, but fuels the demand for exotic pets.
This demand gives illegal traffickers a space in which to operate,
as they can undercut the high prices charged by legal breeders.
In some cases, of course, captive breeding has its advantages.
Conservation often uses breed-to-release programs
to boost the wild populations of endangered species.
But breeding parrots in captivity to keep as pets also puts
greater distance between the birds and their wild origins.
Their astonishing ability to mimic human speech might seem entertaining,
or provide companionship,
but it's just one facet of these birds remarkable intelligence and sociability.
With the world's captive and wild parrots in roughly equal proportions,
it's more important than ever that legal loopholes are closed,
trade regulations are more strictly enforced
and would-be owners are educated.
Thanks for watching and please
share this video to spread the word, because right now, about
85% of all pet parrots are abandoned or resold within two years.
So it's really time to act.
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