How a cockatoo who sings songs from Hamilton on TikTok is fuelling a merciless commerce in stolen and smuggled unique birds… as revealed by JANE FRYER

The thieves moved stealthily, under cover of darkness, and were well prepared with bolt-cutters, cardboard boxes, nets and a comprehensive hit list: 40 budgerigars, 20 canaries, two cockatiels, three Bourke parakeets and two red-rumped parrots.

First they chopped the padlocks off the main gate of Grange Road Pets in Botley, Southampton, and dipped low past the CCTV.

Then, after wisely giving the two bad-tempered peacocks a wide berth, they sliced through the lock on the outside aviary.

Next, they worked through eight of the aviary’s inner cages – catching the birds in nets and decanting them into boxes. All of them.

‘They took the lot,’ says Martin McLellan, 62, who has run the pet shop since 1984, and discovered all the doors swinging open on the morning of October 8. 

‘There was not one bird left in any cage out there. They knew what they were doing – all the most valuable birds – worth thousands. We’re devastated. They could be anywhere now – we’ll never know.’

Sadly, he’s right.

Some probably popped up soon afterwards at bird auctions, where buyers turned a blind eye to their lack of paperwork. Or were passed on to illegal breeders. A clutch of them could have been smuggled across to Ireland, where apparently there’s huge demand for exotic birds.

But not the two cockatiels – by far the most valuable birds. According to experts, they could be heading in a different direction altogether – towards the bright lights of TikTok and YouTube and, if all goes to plan, adulation from millions of followers.

Which sounds a bit, well, mad. But over the past couple of years videos of exotic birds have become big on social media. Huge, in fact.

And, just to be clear, we’re not talking about videos that show them in their natural habitat, swooping through the Amazon jungle or foraging in the lowland rainforests of West Africa.

No, these are dancing parrots. Swearing cockatoos. Beatboxing macaws. Giving their avian-all in brightly lit sitting rooms and kitchens.

There’s Furby the umbrella cockatoo, who has 450,000 followers watching him singing along to songs from the musical Hamilton and celebrating like mad when his favourite shows are on telly.

Molly the African grey parrot, has more than 4.7 million TikTok likes. And Apollo, another African grey, who has had more than 6.6 million views.

They curse. They headbang. They talk. They bop away on their perches to Ariana Grande.

Some activate smart speakers from their perch (‘play the Beach Boys, Alexa!’) and start boogying in their cages.

And most of them mimic human speech patterns so well – ‘Get me a cup of tea’, ‘Fresh water please!’ – that it looks like they are chatting with their owners.

All of which, of course, makes for brilliantly funny videos, memes and GIFs for us to watch. But perhaps not surprisingly, this comes with a down side.

Not least, because suddenly everyone wants a performing parrot. Which means that demand for these exotic and critically endangered birds – particularly scarlet macaws, African grey parrots and cockatoos – has rocketed. 

This, in turn, has led to a rise in expert raids on pet shops such as Martin’s and thefts from homes (parrot enthusiast Facebook groups are awash with suggestions about tagging and chipping birds and even taking DNA and feather samples, just in case).

But there has also been a huge spike in illegally-traded birds, smuggled into the UK from the Continent, mostly the Netherlands, and crammed into tiny loo-roll inners, poster tubes and shoeboxes. 

Some are ripped from their natural habitats – with poachers setting traps and painting glue on branches. Others are illegally bred.

So many exotic birds are now being discovered – some almost dead from distress and dehydration, others already dead – by UK Border Force, that they’ve had to rope in the help of the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA).

It has a facility in a top-secret location in the north of England, run by Julie Lane, who has a PhD in animal psychology, specialises in animal welfare and is head of APHA’s National Wildlife Management Centre.

‘The numbers coming in are getting larger, and we’re expecting more,’ says Julie. ‘Which is heartbreaking.’

Over the past two years, her team has cared for more than 1,000 birds, including parrots, parakeets, parrotlets, macaws, cockatoos, ibises, conures and lovebirds. 

It goes without saying that these are the tip of the iceberg. Many more will slip through, or die in transit.

Earlier this month they received 240 birds in a single consignment, including critically endangered species, and currently have at least 210 feathered inmates.

Many arrive at Dover in a truly appalling state – bedraggled, dehydrated, exhausted, diseased and often plucking out their own feathers in distress. Occasionally they are so poorly that they have to be euthanised on the spot.

All must stay for the 30-day quarantine period before being rehomed in zoos (ideally with breeding programmes for rarer breeds), but many need longer care and are not easy to look after.

Julie explains that exotic bird chicks are tricky to wean and must be hand-fed warm food, between 39 and 41 centigrade, every four hours around the clock, for weeks. 

‘It’s hard work and they look so similar we have to mark their toes with nail varnish to show when they’ve been fed,’ she says. 

Damien – a galah cockatoo and so named because of his dreadful shrieking – was in a terrible state when he arrived, but after weeks of hand-feeding has now been dispatched to a zoo.

Winston, an eclectus parrot, was dishevelled and stressed after being rammed in a teeny box. Eric, another eclectus, who also arrived in a very sorry state with a malformed beak, looked touch and go for a while, but is now doing well.

It is desperately sad and Julie knows who to blame.

‘Unfortunately, people see them on social media and think, “That looks fun” and want them as pets, which is leading to a marked increase in smuggled birds,’ she says. ‘But they don’t understand much about them.’

For starters, these are flock animals that mate for life, live in highly complex social groups in the wild and love to fly – ‘so living as a single pet in a home is tough for them’, she says.

And people don’t understand how much social stimulation they need, how very clever they are and how they tend to take to only one owner – which can cause tension, long-term.

 Of course, our love for exotic birds is nothing new. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the annual bird shows at London’s Alexandra Palace and Birmingham’s NEC were even televised by the BBC.

As a result, the illegal trade of parrots and cockatoos – and their stolen eggs (which poachers strap to their waists and keep warm with their own body heat until they reach a proper incubator) – has always been big business.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, with growing concerns about animal welfare and increased awareness of how important it is for the birds to be able to exhibit natural behaviours, demand softened, the market eased and bird-associated crimes dipped – other than with African greys, which have always been in hot demand.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare – IFAW – estimates that 1.3 million African greys alone were captured between 1982 and 2001, before becoming protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 2016.

But suddenly it feels like we’re going backwards again.

‘There’s been a reversal. It’s creeping back up,’ says Julie Lane. ‘And we do put it down partly to these videos on TikTok.’ 

Les Rance from The Parrot Society UK remembers another craze, not so long ago. ‘We’ve been here before,’ he says. ‘When the Harry Potter films came out, suddenly everyone wanted a pet owl. That didn’t go well either, because they’re not really pets and they sleep all day.’

Poor Martin has had so many parrots stolen from Grange Road Pets, in broad daylight, that he won’t stock them any more.

‘We have a direct line to the police, but in [the thieves] come, smash the door down, grab a pair of parrots and race off before the police come. It’s not worth it.’

Most were African greys. ‘Everyone loves them,’ he says. ‘Because they’re so incredibly clever.’

In fact, some enthusiasts insist that, despite having a brain the size of a small walnut, they have a similar intellect to a three-year-old child.

This means that they can learn entire phrases and form very strong bonds with their owners – nuzzling, greeting, sitting on their shoulders and jabbering away.

And the really clever ones can do a lot more.

Take Alex, an African grey who was once recognised by the Guinness Book Of Records as the world’s cleverest parrot. 

He featured in several books written by his owner, Irene Pepperberg, a research scientist, who found he could identify 50 different objects, count to six, distinguish between colours and shapes, had a vocabulary of more than 100 words, but was exceptional in that he appeared to understand what it all meant.

In fact, his last words, just before his premature death, aged 31, in 2007, were ‘You be good. I love you.’

Another African grey, Apollo, now big on TikTok, recently stole Alex’s crown in the record books, after showing he could talk in complete or nearly complete English sentences and answer basic questions.

Of course, parrots like Alex and Apollo are rare. Most of them are not actually chatting. They’re birds, not toddlers. And, as Les Rance explains, they’re just brilliant mimics – hence their ability to sing and dance like pop stars.

‘They copy any sound that grabs them,’ he says. Which might be the lyrics to a Robbie Williams song. Or the sound of a lorry reversing. Or the ping of a microwave, ‘which can be very annoying when your baked potato isn’t ready’, says Les.

But not as annoying as one bird he knew, who mimicked the sound of his owner’s 17-year-old daughter stubbing her very painful ingrowing toenail on the stairs.

‘It screamed and screamed in a high-pitched voice, exactly as she had done. For 20 years – long after she’d left home.’

And that’s another thing about parrots. They live for ages – up to 60 years, often outliving their owners and repeating the same lines. Again and again and again.

So unless something changes, Furby is likely to be still singing Hamilton songs in 50 years, whether anyone’s still watching or not.

In the meantime, unless anything changes, thousands of poor bedraggled and traumatised birds will keep arriving at the APHA facility to be nursed back to life by Julie Lane and her dedicated team.

And back in Botley, Martin is grimly realistic – he knows he is unlikely to see his birds again, but just hopes they’re safe.

And, who knows, maybe, just maybe, one will pop up singing along to a Queen song, or head-banging, or perhaps – if it’s as clever as Alex or Apollo – asking its new owner what on earth it’s doing making TikTok videos, when it could be flying about in the jungle.