A Promising New Tool Could Help Protect Parrots and Snag Smugglers

Wildlife and customs officials working to stop the illegal parrot trade are in a tough spot. While it is against the law to capture wild parrots, buying and selling captive-bred individuals remains legal. Along with the high demand for parrots as pets, the difficulty in distinguishing captive-bred from wild individuals is one reason the intelligent birds remain among the most-trafficked animals in the world, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Tools exist for identifying illegally trafficked parrots, but they require specialized training, are time-consuming, and can be stressful for the animals, says Steven Janssen, a mobile veterinarian for the World Parrot Trust. As a result, officials mostly use a subjective process to determine which parrots warrant investigation for potential trafficking. “You base your decision on behavior. Is this an animal that is timid and starts screaming when you approach?” Janssen says. “Even for people who are into birds and know birds, this is difficult.”

Now, researchers are refining a new method that could help law enforcement quickly and easily distinguish wild from captive-bred individuals. And it begins with a fecal sample.

The tool is the result of a collaborative effort between scientists at the World Parrot Trust, the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Nature Iraq. The researchers say they hope it will help officials crack down on traffickers attempting to launder wild-caught parrots through legitimate channels.

Parrots face a higher risk of extinction than most other birds, and the illegal wildlife trade is considered a major driver of population declines. Captive breeding to offset demand for wild-caught birds has spiked in recent decades—but it may not have the intended effect. Wildlife smugglers work hard to pass wild birds off as captive-bred, sometimes falsifying documents or paying off enforcement officials. “Studies show that the legal trade can mask or even increase the market for wild-caught birds,” says Sara Walker, senior advisor on wildlife trafficking for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, who is not part of the project.

The new method aims to remove the guesswork for customs officers. It’s based on what the birds eat: Wild parrots have a diverse diet, feeding on berries, nuts, insects, and plant matter. Captive individuals, on the other hand, typically are fed commercial bird feed, often medicated with antibiotics. These different diets form a type of “microbiome fingerprint” that researchers can identify in a fecal sample.

“Let’s say you’re a customs officer at an airport and you have a crate with like 20 parrots, you have to decide whether they’re captive bred, whether they’re legal birds,” says Janssen, head of the project. “For our method, you just stick a swab in the cage and you sweep over the bottom, collect some fecal material, and you can determine it that way.”

The team has successfully tested the tool in the lab, but now they’re working to implement it in practical settings like breeding facilities and airports. As these tests could be used by customs officials and later serve as forensic evidence, Janssen says that creating an easy-to-use kit with clear protocols that meet legal standards is essential.

They’re also working to collect more parrot poop to make the test as effective as possible. The tool compares fecal samples from unknown birds against a database of known captive and wild parrot samples. A larger database for comparison means a more accurate test, but it’s tricky to get samples from wild populations. “We try to find spots in the wild where parrots nest or roost, but they’re really hard to find and really hard to access once you find them,” Janssen says. Instead, the researchers often collect samples from confirmed wild birds that law enforcement has just confiscated.

For now, Janssen and other team members are involved in all the testing, but in the next two years they hope to provide kits that customs officials can use without assistance. In the future, they also want to expand the project to other trafficked species.

The tool could be very valuable for frontline enforcement officers, Walker says, but she also believes that putting a real dent in parrot trafficking will require the public’s help. Animal lovers could be unintentionally driving higher demand for trafficked birds by purchasing a pet parrot or even just sharing cute parrot videos online, she says. “They need to understand that there is this illegal trade sometimes masked through the legal trade,” she says, “and they need to be responsible consumers.”