Tidwell Article/Parrots 1 PARROTS & PROFITS by John Tidwell Sept 8, 2000 "AAAWWK!" Artie's small black eyes glittered and his cheeks began to turn a deep red. Then a spectacular black crest rose slowly on his head, the same way a human might lift suspicious brows. Sitting in her Rockville pet shop his owner, Ruth Hanessian, spoke gently to the large black palm cockatoo (Probosci geraterrimus) and lovingly kissed his bare red cheek. The crest went down and Artie began to thoughtfully crack a Brazil nut. Artie is a bird with a past, and his story is typical of the odyssey many wild-caught parrots still experience. 18 years ago he was stolen by poachers as a chick from his nest in the remote jungles of Indonesia, becoming part of an illegal shipment of more than 200 palm cockatoos secreted out of Indonesia and laundered with new 'legal' papers, first in Malaysia and then in Singapore for export to the U.S. It was here that Artie first saw Richard and Annamarie Stevenson, an American couple with a shady Florida-based wholesale wildlife business. In the months since the birds arrived half of them had either died or been destroyed from a suspected outbreak of Newcastle's Disease, a lethal virus that can also infect humans. Even so, no one had ever tried to ship this many palm cockatoos to the U.S. before, and the Stevensons had sunk about $200,000 into this group. As they stood watching them, the couple had to smile. This was going to be their ticket to wealth and luxury. There was a good reason black palm cockatoos were practically unknown to most breeders in the U.S. : they were not allowed out of their native Australia and New Guinea. The only legal way anyone could export them from Indonesia was with the permission of president Suharto himself, which the Stevensons didn't have. But this was the early 1980s, the very height of the international illegal bird trade, when laws governing the importation of wildlife into North America were vague. In fact, the U.S. was named the world's largest importer of wild parrots by its own Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), with more than 800,000 birds coming in legally every year and probably twice that number on the black market. Parrots were the primary focus of the trade, their beauty, intelligence and rarity often making them as coveted as a Ming Vase or a Stradivarius. Trade stretched globally from Australia to Africa, with dealers making as much as $600,000 per year just selling parrots. Birds were smuggled through international airports and across dusty border checkpoints in suitcases, tire wells, rolled up newspapers, hollowed-out car Tidwell Article/Parrots 2 doors and lengths of PVC plumbing pipe. When Artie and the other 99 cockatoos arrived at Miami International airport one sultry afternoon in September 1983, the birds had been crowed into their small wooden crates for so long that some were sick and dying. But to the Stevensons business was great. Only the year before they had brought in 27 other palm cockatoos, with the approval of the USFWS. The birds were barely a day out of USDA- licensed quarantine, when collector Richard Schubot strode unexpectedly into their Ft. Lauderdale ranch. Richard Stevenson knew the cantankerous Schubot had made millions in McDonald's franchises and wanted to amass the greatest private collection of exotic birds in the U.S. And what Schubot wanted, he got, one way or another. "He says 'how much do you want for them?'" Stevenson recalls, his nasal Cape Cod accent making him sound like a Boston cabbie. "And I says $5,000 each. And he says 'Fine, will you take a check?' Then he says 'here is a shopping list of birds I'm looking for, and can you get a hundred of these Black Palms?'" This time the Stevensons weren't waiting on Schubot. Earlier that summer they had placed ads for the cockatoos in several major newspapers, never imagining that a sale of close to $600,000 in birds so rare no U.S. zoo had ever bred them would attract suspicion. It did. Months before, the USFWS and the Department of Justice had managed to obtain a copy Indonesia's Byzantine export laws with the help of Dr. Don Bruning, the Bronx Zoo's expansive Curator of Birds, and was now preparing to seize the cockatoos as smuggled Indonesian 'treasure'. While U.S. laws on the importation of exotic birds were murky, those on trafficking stolen wildlife, known as the Lacey Act, were not. Combined with proof that the birds were protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Stevensons defense crumbled and they forfeited the parrots to the USFWS in exchange for $45,000 and two cockatoos, a settlement Bruning still finds shocking. "They were caught red-handed bringing in birds illegally." Bruning says, still emotional after 17 years, "I mean they should be getting fined, not paid for doing it!" The government now began distributing cockatoos. Some went to the consortium of 11 zoos around the country that had been caring for the birds since their seizure, while 8 cockatoos were returned to Jakarta to smooth the feathers of the Indonesians. The remaining birds were auctioned, as the USFWS often did with confiscated animals, to breeders with solid cockatoo track record. Ramon Noegel, one of the buyers, eventually sent his three birds on permanent loan to the Avicultural Research & Breeding Center of Loxahatchee Florida, the machine-gun patrolled, avian Xanadu of Richard Schubot. Tidwell Article/Parrots 3 Today the ABRC boasts some 120 palm cockatoos, the largest collection in the U.S. Artie, otherwise known as #62 was one of four cockatoos the government donated to SeaWorld. Five years later he was sold several times to different private breeders, finally ending up in Ruth Hanessian's pet shop. Today he sits in his cage, chomping macadamia nuts and flirting with anyone wearing black. But is this the best fate for an endangered parrot? After intensive lobbying from conservation groups, Congress enacted the Wild Bird Conservation Act in 1992, putting an end to the laissez-faire days of the American parrot trade. According to John Webb, Assistant Chief of the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Wild Bird Act put teeth into the CITES agreement and stopped further bird imports. "The Wild Bird Act ended the bird trade in the United States." he says, "I mean we have really gotten out of the market. And I think that's one of the big success stories of the laws that were enacted to protect exotic birds." Of the 58 at-risk species of parrot that aviculturists and smugglers lust after the most, all but two are protected under these laws. In the years since the Wild Bird Act was passed, the illegal international trade in parrots has noticeably dwindled. According to the USFWS, many career wildlife smugglers have shifted their trade from rare birds to equally rare reptiles, leaving the forces of bird conservation without a monolithic enemy to focus on. As a result, the post-Wild Bird Act era is one of complexity and moral ambivalence, requiring whole new approaches and uneasy alliances between aviculturists and conservationists. Welcome to the murky world of parrot conservation. Today as in the 1980s, the two principal threats to parrots remain habitat destruction, by natural or human forces, and the unsustainable harvesting of wild birds. While the international trade in parrots has become smaller, it has also become more focused. According to Richard Marks, Regional Division head of the USFWS' Law Enforcement Branch, bird pirates now target the rarest of the rare. "The illegal trade focuses on the most endangered parrots because they bring the highest prices." he says, "Many times poachers will steal eggs rather than the birds. And once the eggs are hatched in Europe or the U.S. and breeding pairs are established no one can prove they were smuggled." Today some 45 endangered parrots are listed on CITES' Appendix I section, the convention's highest order of protection. Species on this list are so depleted by habitat destruction and poaching that any commercial trade in them would spell almost certain extinction. Some of the most vulnerable populations of these parrots are isolated on the tiny islands of the Caribbean, where modern bird pirates, like the buccaneers of the 18th Century, lurk offshore waters in search of feathered gold. Don Bruning says the ecological threat to these parrots, from even a handful of such smugglers could be catastrophic. "Its significant because some of these island Tidwell Article/Parrots 4 parrot populations only have a couple of hundred birds left in the wild." he explains," If you remove 10 or 20 chicks you are having a major impact on that population." The West Indian island of St. Lucia lies like an emerald between Martinique and St. Vincent, its verdant Piton mountains shrouded in mist. High in its sultry central rainforests lives the Jacquot (Amazona versicolor), a large green and blue parrot that is unique to St. Lucia. Its also a member of the Appendix I club. The bird's tiny 40-mile range was steadily eaten away over the years by plantations and its beautiful plumage made the Jacquot a favorite target of smugglers. By 1971 less than 100 were observed in the wild and it was feared that the species would vanish. In the late 1970s the USFWS started working with St.