![]() ![]() "The question will be where will they wind up? What is their journey going to be? It's just beginning."Īccording to WWF, while many parrots are legal and bred as pets, "there is also a dark side to the parrot trade." They're highly intelligent, very social, and these guys deserve a chance," he said. Fish and Wildlife Services on a plan "to have the birds fly free and help restore their species in the wild." Reillo is now faced with the challenge of finding a permanent home for the birds, which can live 60 to 70 years, or longer. That would have been another 24 to 36 hours of travel." ![]() "The fact that the chicks were hatching the first day of his travel from Managua to Miami tells you that it's extremely unlikely that any of them would have survived had he actually gotten all the way to his destination in Taiwan. "The vast majority of these trafficking cases end in tragedy," Reillo said. The red-lored Amazon is also listed as having a decreasing population. ![]() "In fact, the biggest threat to parrots globally is a combination of habitat loss and trafficking," Reillo said, adding that about 90% of eggs are poached for illegal parrot trade.īirdLife International lists the yellow-naped Amazon as "critically endangered" with a population in the wild of between 1,000 and 2,500. The trafficking pipeline out of Central America is well established and has gone on for years, he said. They discovered the 24 surviving parrots were from eight or nine clutches and included two species - the yellow naped Amazon and the red-lored Amazon.īoth birds are popular in the trafficking and caged-bird industries because they are pretty and have a nice temperament, Reillo said. "We've got all these eggs, the chicks are hatching, the incubator's running and by the time it was all said and done, we hatched 26 of the 29 eggs, and 24 of the 26 chicks survived."īut they still weren't sure which of the 360 varieties of parrots they were dealing with.Ī forensics team at Florida International extracted DNA samples from the eggshells and the deceased birds to identify the species. "At that point we were off to the races," he said. Stacy McFarlane, a USDA veterinarian who initially tended to the birds and eggs at the airport, and other officials, delivered the baby parrots and remaining eggs to Reillo's conservatory. Department of Agriculture's aviary at the airport in a mad dash to save the now-hatching parrots. He helped set up a makeshift incubator in the U.S. Baby parrots are featherless, so it's difficult to property identify them. "They didn't know what these things were and wanted my advice on it," Reillo said. It didn't take long for federal officials to reach out to Reillo. By then, eight of the birds had already hatched or were in the process of hatching. The officer took the bag and contacted the U.S. He denied knowing what kind of birds they were. "You ready to meet the children?" asked Paul Reillo, a Florida International University professor and director of the foundation, as he led visitors Friday into a small building tucked behind a sprawling house in Loxahatchee, a rural community near West Palm Beach.Ī lawyer who could speak on his behalf was not listed on court records, but Wu told investigators through a Mandarin interpreter that a friend had paid him to travel from Taiwan to Nicaragua to pick up the eggs. Young yellow-naped Amazon parrots are carried in a plastic tub at the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation in Loxahatchee, Fla., Friday, May 19, 2023. They are almost fully feathered now and the staff has started transitioning them from a special formula to a diet of food pellets and fruit. The Central American natives, seized from a smuggler at Miami International Airport, are being raised by the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation - a round-the-clock effort that includes five hand feedings a day in a room filled with large cages.Īt just 9 weeks old, these parrots have already survived a harrowing journey after being snatched from their nests in a forest. The 24 bright green baby parrots began chirping and bobbing their heads the second anyone neared the large cages that have been their homes since hatching in March. ![]()
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