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.
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.
At just 9 weeks old, these parrots have already survived a harrowing journey after being snatched from their nests in a forest. 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.
Photo: AP
“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.
“They are hand-raised babies,” he said, as the chicks squawked and looked inquisitively at the visitors. “They’ve never seen mom and dad; they’ve been raised by us since they hatched.”
It was the hatchlings’ faint chirping inside a carry-on bag at the Miami airport that brought them to the attention of a US Customs and Border Protection officer. The passenger, Szu Ta-wu, had just arrived on TACA Airlines flight 392 from Managua, Nicaragua, on March 23, and was changing flights in Miami to return home to Taiwan, according to a criminal complaint filed in US District Court in Miami.
Photo: AP
Officers stopped Wu at a checkpoint. He was asked about the sound coming from his bag, which Reillo later described as a “sophisticated” temperature controlled cooler.
Wu reached in and pulled out a smaller bag and showed the officer an egg, the complaint said. The officer then looked inside and saw more eggs and a tiny featherless bird that had just hatched.
He told the officer there were 29 eggs, and that he did not have documentation to transport the birds, according to the complaint.
Wu was arrested, and on May 5 pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling birds into the US. He faces up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced Aug. 1.
A 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. He denied knowing what kind of birds they were.
The officer took the bag and contacted the US Fish and Wildlife Service. By then, eight of the birds had already hatched or were in the process of hatching.
It didn’t take long for federal officials to reach out to Reillo.
“They didn’t know what these things were and wanted my advice on it,” Reillo said. Baby parrots are featherless, so it’s difficult to property identify them.
He helped set up a makeshift incubator in the US. Department of Agriculture’s aviary at the airport in a mad dash to save the now-hatching parrots.
The next day, 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.
“At that point we were off to the races,” he 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.”
USDA regulations required the birds to be quarantined for 45 days, meaning that Reillo and his team had to scrub down when entering and leaving the room.
But they still weren’t sure which of the 360 varieties of parrots they were dealing with.
A forensics team at Florida International extracted DNA samples from the eggshells and the deceased birds to identify the species. 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.
Both birds are popular in the trafficking and caged-bird industries because they are pretty and have a nice temperament, Reillo said.
The trafficking pipeline out of Central America is well established and has gone on for years, he said.
“In fact, the biggest threat to parrots globally is a combination of habitat loss and trafficking,” Reillo said, adding that about 90 percent of eggs are poached for illegal parrot trade.
BirdLife International lists the yellow-naped Amazon as “critically endangered” with a population in the wild of between 1,000 and 2,500. The red-lored Amazon is also listed as having a decreasing population.
“The vast majority of these trafficking cases end in tragedy,” Reillo said. “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. That would have been another 24 to 36 hours of travel.”
Reillo is now faced with the challenge of finding a permanent home for the birds, which can live 60 to 70 years, or longer. He said he’s working with the US Fish and Wildlife Services on a plan “to have the birds fly free and help restore their species in the wild.”
“Parrots live a long time. They are sentient creatures. They’re highly intelligent, very social, and these guys deserve a chance,” he said. “The question will be where will they wind up? What is their journey going to be? It’s just beginning.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist