This story is in partnership with WILDLIFE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS, a nonprofit journalism organization exposing wildlife crime and exploitation of nature.
T
he bird man is at his desk, vaping and working the phone. Fly traps coated with insects dangle from the ceiling. Tigers and lions pace fenced enclosures in the backyard. Tilting in his swivel chair — legs crossed, plaid short-sleeve shirt unbuttoned to the chest, reading glasses propped on his balding head — Gideon Fourie takes a long drag on his blue vape and begins to tell me how he became one of South Africa’s leading parrot traders.
“The African grey is the best talking and friendly [sic] bird in the world,” Fourie says, rolling the R’s in his heavily Afrikaans-inflected English. He swats a tabby cat off the brown leather sofa where I’m sitting in his home office in Nigel, a small gold-mining town about 40 miles southeast of Johannesburg. On this sweaty February day in the Southern Hemisphere, he’s speaking above the whir of an oscillating floor fan and the drone of Fox News. He smiles: “Yes, that’s the popular one.”
African grey parrots, the world’s smartest birds, are vanishing.
Karine Aigner
Fourie’s involvement in the animal trade has deep roots. As a boy living in Rustenburg, he helped out on his parents’ ostrich farm and tannery, which turned skins from springbok antelope and other animals into rugs, hats, purses, wallets, and throw pillows. Later, after working for the family business selling ostriches to the U.S. and Taiwan, he joined the South African Air Force, where he became a certified metalworking instructor before getting into politics as a town counselor in Boksburg.
A framed cover of The Economist on the wall shows a thirtysomething Fourie and his toddler Phillipus, whom he calls Billy, at a political rally for the far-right, white-supremacist, neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) paramilitary organization. Blond little Billy wears an olive-green button-down shirt with a patch representing the Vierkleur, the flag of the former Boer-led South African Republic, and holds in his pudgy hands a flag emblazoned with the AWB’s swastika-like symbol.
In the early 1990s, when South Africa began transitioning to democracy, Fourie got out of politics — “too many [sic] corruption,” he says. He returned to his family roots in the animal industry after a friend in Taiwan asked him to acquire some African grey parrots for the pet trade. What started as a single shipment soon grew into a sprawling 30-year business shipping tens of thousands of African greys globally — along with all sorts of other exotic birds and animals. It has also landed Fourie on the wrong side of the law — two years ago, he was convicted of smuggling endangered parrots and monkeys out of Johannesburg. (He doesn’t want to talk about that.)
African grey parrots — roughly the size of a pigeon, with sleek grey bodies and crimson tail feathers — are the great apes of the bird world. Their brain is the size of a walnut, but they have the intelligence of young children and are renowned for their freakish ability to mimic human speech, traits that make them popular pets and TikTok superstars crooning opera, whistling, and cursing “Fuck you!”
Editor’s picks
I’ve spent too many hours scrolling videos of grey parrots doing everything from singing “Who let the birds out!” to playing soccer and beating Harvard students on memory tests. A grey parrot named Bud helped solve his owner’s murder by repeating the last words the man said to his wife during a fatal argument: “Don’t fucking shoot!” Einstein knows more than 200 words and sounds, and even has her own TED talk. Gizmo tells Siri to set a timer for “chirp, chirp” and regularly asks his owners, “Whatcha doing?” — punctuated by kissy noises and “I love you’s.” Bailey, a grey in Alabama with a Southern twang, likes to ask “Where’s the whiskey?” and “Want a beer?”
Related Content
But there’s a dark side to the hilarious parrot reels. Animal-welfare activists say the treatment of parrots raised for the pet trade is cruel and inhumane and should be abolished. Many parrots come from commercial farms — essentially bird mills — with rows of hundreds of caged breeding pairs pumping out chicks that are sold and shipped often thousands of miles in cramped wooden boxes. The rising demand for pet African grey parrots and the price for a single bird — as much as $7,000 — drive rampant poaching in the forests of West and Central Africa. An estimated 1.3 million wild African greys were traded from 1975 to 2015, but the true number taken was likely far higher — possibly up to 3 million — because most die in transit. Alarmed by the trend, in 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) designated African greys as “endangered” — at risk of imminent extinction.
Watch the short film below
The underground market for greys often operates on the same digital platforms where performing parrots draw millions of followers. Illicit trading is difficult to track: Financial transactions take place through encrypted messaging apps, closed social media groups, and hidden corners of the internet, where sellers use vague language and coded messages to avoid detection. The illegal wildlife trade is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises, alongside guns, drugs, and human trafficking, and is often run by the same crime syndicates. But law enforcement is more focused on those other crimes — animal smuggling is a low priority, with minimal penalties. “It’s high reward and low risk,” says Ian Guildford, an investigator with the U.K. National Wildlife Crime Unit.
To understand the crisis facing African grey parrots, I traveled from poaching hot spots in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the twilight chatter of their flocks is growing quiet, to South Africa, the world’s largest exporter of captive-bred African greys. Wildlife-crime investigators have long suspected that birds snatched from the wild are laundered through the country’s legal export channels. Searching for clues, I tracked dozens of leads on the ground and teamed up with a Colorado scientist and a retired South African environmental-law-enforcement agent to test if an innovative forensic technique — analyzing parrots’ gut microbes — could reveal whether some parrot exporters are trafficking poached birds. In the glitzy United Arab Emirates, a major marketplace for greys, I visited dozens of pet shops catering to families who want their own talking bird. And in a Florida living room, I met an African grey who is trending on YouTube.
Parrot reels might seem benign, says Rowan Martin, director of the nonprofit World Parrot Trust’s Africa conservation program, but the posts are “playing a central role in opening up vast new markets for exotic wildlife.” Openings that traders like Fourie are ready to seize upon.
Gideon Fourie is a leading South African parrot trader.
Karine Aigner
Apollo’s claws dig into my scalp as he finds his balance after climbing up from my shoulder. Just a pound of feathers and beak, he peers down at me with curious eyes, intrigued by the new visitor taking a selfie with him. Apollo belongs to Dalton and Tori Mason, a YouTube couple in their mid-twenties who live in St. Petersburg, Florida. They bought him from a local pet store as an eight-month-old in 2020 with plans to make him the star of a profit-making YouTube channel. “Talking animals, that’s one of the biggest fantasy sort of genre tropes ever,” Dalton says. “It would a hundred percent work.”
And it has. Apollo first said “hello,” and then “fresh water,” delighting fans when the couple started posting videos in 2021. He now knows about 50 words, has around 3 million followers on TikTok, and a Guinness World Record for the most items identified by a parrot in three minutes: 12, including “book,” “bug,” and “sock.”
Fourie’s facility houses parrots and other wildlife.
Karine Aigner
“Want a snack,” Apollo says after Dalton scoops him from my head. “Earn a snack.”
This means he’s ready to work, Dalton says.
“Two questions — you get a snack,” Dalton instructs. He holds out a copy of a famous parrot researcher’s memoir and asks the bird, “What’s this called?”
Apollo answers, “Book.”
“Yes, book,” Dalton replies, following with “What’s the book made of?”
“Paper,” Apollo answers.
“Yes, good job,” Dalton says. “Here’s a pistachio.”
Between quizzes, Apollo practices his repertoire: “Block … rock … bottle … doo doo! … Want a pistache?” and whistles “Funkytown” while the Masons recount their journey to YouTube fame and their future plans.
Florida parrot Apollo, who belongs to Dalton and Tori Mason, has 3 million TikTok followers.
Revenue from social media advertising and merch — T-shirts, hoodies, pint glasses, coffee mugs — has allowed Dalton, who previously sold glassware on eBay, and Tori, a drugstore cashier, to quit their jobs. They estimate that combined they make about $120,000 a year, and they recently moved into a bigger rental house. Videos in which they ask Apollo questions such as “What color?” are the biggest moneymakers, they say, often attracting millions of views. They hope one day to earn enough money from their videos to buy a mansion where Apollo will have lots of space to fly freely. (They’ll live in the mother-in-law suite, Tori jokes.)
As Smart As a First Grader
Apollo may have shot to fame thanks to social media, but talking birds have been popular since way before TikTok. Queen Victoria had several grey parrots as pets who spoke French, told jokes, and sang, “God Save the Queen.” U.S. President Andrew Jackson owned a grey named Poll that reportedly squawked and cursed at his funeral.
Animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg bought a year-old African grey named Alex at Noah’s Ark pet store near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in the late 1970s, launching her exploration into a new field of research that reshaped our understanding of animal intelligence and communication. In the previous decade, researchers had taught apes to use sign language to convey their thoughts and feelings, revealing that nonhuman primates are capable of grasping complex concepts, forming sentences, even initiating conversations. Pepperberg wanted to know if a bird, with a very different brain, might also be capable of such sophisticated learning.
“Parrot reels are playing a central role in opening up new markets for exotic wildlife.”
Her studies with Alex over the next three decades, detailed in her book Alex & Me, redefined the meaning of “bird brain.” She found that Alex could use more than a hundred words, identify colors and shapes, understand forms of matter — metal, wood, glass — and grasp abstract concepts such as “same” and “different.” Remarkably, he understood the concept of zero, something that baffles most humans younger than four. Pepperberg demonstrated that Alex could use language to answer questions, share his desires, joke, even express frustration and regret. Alex once asked a woman he’d met if she’d like a nut or some corn. When she said, “No, thank you,” he replied, “Well, what do you want?” Another time, after he shredded a 20-page grant proposal Pepperberg had spent weeks writing on an electric typewriter, she yelled, “How could you do such a thing, Alex?” He surprised her with the words “I’m sorry.”
The first time Alex noticed himself in a mirror, he cocked his head and said, “What’s that?”
“That’s you. You’re a parrot,” replied Pepperberg’s student Kathy Davidson, who was looking after him that day.
Alex looked into the mirror and asked, “What color?”
“Grey,” Davidson replied. “You’re a grey parrot, Alex.”
This exchange, though brief, had huge significance. Alex’s questions suggested that he not only recognized his reflection — a sign of self-awareness long considered to be a uniquely human trait — but also that he was curious about his appearance.
Alex and other African grey parrots have evolved to have a complex awareness of their world, Pepperberg tells me. Their “huge memory” allows them to find food in sprawling forests where they fly up to 35 miles a day, to remember social dynamics within their flock, and to communicate through songs and vocalizations.
Pepperberg’s work with Alex was cut short. He died in 2007 at 31 — barely middle-aged for an animal that can live up to 80 years. A necropsy showed no discernible cause of death, but it was later determined that Alex likely suffered a fatal arrhythmia, heart attack, or stroke. His last words to Pepperberg were the same as always at bedtime: “You be good. I love you.”
Parrots are fitted with anklets to identify where they’re from.
Karine Aigner
Pepperberg received an outpouring of support and condolences. One New England man who owned an African grey parrot wrote that he was so devastated that he had to leave work early: “My eyes have been welling up at various points throughout the day.”
Pepperberg still hears from people wanting a bird just like Alex. But, she says, most of them are unprepared for the commitment of caring for “a creature with the intellectual capacity of a six- to eight-year-old, the personality of a two-year-old — I want what I want, when I want it, and what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine! — a beak like a Swiss Army Knife, and a voice like a klaxon.” Parrots aren’t usually compatible with people who have long workdays at the office, kids, and the endless activities that come with them, she says. Her advice to most would-be buyers: “Get a picture of a parrot, paste it on the wall, and just look at it.”
The Masons realize that videos of parrots like Apollo doing extraordinary things inspire online viewers all over the world to buy their own parrots. But they see a greater good in teaching people about parrot cognition because it can help make the case that birds, just like cats and dogs, deserve animal-welfare protections.
“Live animals are a very risky business — it’s not like selling shoes. your shoe cannot die.”
Critics say that argument is misguided — animals that fly shouldn’t spend their lives in cages. “Every cell in a parrot’s body was engineered for flight,” says Karen Windsor, the executive director of Foster Parrots, a Rhode Island nonprofit dedicated to rescuing unwanted and abused parrots. “Their hearts and lungs were designed for an enormous level of cardiovascular activity. Air sacs under their skin act like bellows, pumping abundant oxygen into their lungs quickly. Their eyes, their hollow bones, and, of course, their feathers are all designed for a relationship with the wind and sky.”
That’s why caged parrots are prone to atherosclerosis, heart disease, and stroke, Windsor says. Healthy greys often outlive their human companions, suffering anxiety and depression when they suddenly find themselves without their person. “You get a parrot when you’re 40, and it seems like a good idea, but by the time you’re 80, that bird’s just middle-aged,” Windsor says. It’s one reason sanctuaries like hers are experiencing a surge of surrendered African greys.
Another is buyer’s remorse. “Everybody wants an Alex,” and “there are so many African grey stars on social media,” she says. But often the birds aren’t as “cuddly” as the buyer anticipated. “Some are prone to phobias and self-destructive behaviors like [feather] plucking.”
Windsor says parrot lovers should consider adopting a bird if they think they can provide a lasting home. “There are so many parrots — just like cats and dogs — and the rescues are full. We’re turning birds away because we can’t fit them in.”
Fight or Flight
Smaragda Louw thinks the entire commercial pet industry should be obliterated. Petite with shoulder-length grey hair, she’s the founder of the South African nonprofit Ban Animal Trading. Wearing a long powder-blue tunic, she meets me at her home on a lush hillside of manicured gardens in Johannesburg. Her organization targets a wide range of animal industries, from “canned” trophy hunting — sport shooting of confined animals — and circuses to scientific laboratories, operations smuggling lion bones for traditional Chinese medicine, and the trade in exotic animals for pets.
In Louw’s study — decorated with a giant ceramic bunny, glowing lanterns, a wall of wooden bookcases, and a fluffy dog bed for her rescue, Bella — are stacks of documents detailing thousands of birds shipped by parrot exporters. She enters the reams of information into a database and stores the hard copies in the room’s crammed walk-in closet. The numbers of birds exported legally are “breathtaking,” she says. Last year, South Africans legally shipped about 60,000 African greys. Louw says the actual number is likely higher than reported because traffickers use tricks to evade the authorities: stashing additional birds in hidden compartments, altering permits (sometimes reusing them multiple times), misidentifying endangered species as common, and bribing airport workers and authorities.
Rescued parrots have cut and damaged feathers.
Karine Aigner
Two years ago, Louw sat for an interview with the South African investigative-journalism television series Carte Blanche. The report was about a shipment of live lions shipped to a notorious zoo in Laos suspected of being involved with the lion-bone trade. Fourie and his business partner, Edward Coetzer, were identified as likely playing a role in the lions’ export, though they deny any wrongdoing.
Fourie had been of interest to Louw for years. In 2010, she learned he was under investigation over the deaths of 730 wild African grey parrots on a flight from Johannesburg to Durban. Authorities traced them to Byart Birds, a company owned by businessman Martin Byart. They suspected that the shipment included parrots seized from trappers and sent to Lwiro Sanctuary, in eastern DRC, for rehabilitation and eventual release back into the wild. Army and government officials allegedly confiscated the birds at gunpoint, threatening the sanctuary’s director. The parrots then vanished, likely back into the pet trade.
Fast forward to Dec. 21, 2018, when Fourie was apprehended for smuggling animals at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport. Officials found in his cargo undeclared endangered species: two cockatoos, eight Amazon parrots, a capuchin monkey, and two small marmosets. He couldn’t produce the permits for those animals. As a result, environmental-law-enforcement agents, the Green Scorpions, seized the shipment, valued at about $36,000.
Fourie agreed in a plea agreement in 2023 to pay a fine of roughly $4,700 and received a suspended five-year prison sentence on condition he stay out of trouble. He was banned from exporting or importing any endangered wildlife until 2028. It infuriates Louw that he’s still in business. “This is a known bird trafficker,” she says, shaking her fist. “He was caught red-handed.”
Louw says her analysis of the export data shows systemic fraud and corruption within South Africa’s grey parrot industry. She has found shipments being sent to fake addresses, making it impossible for authorities to track the parrot supply chain. She has also discovered parrots without the required identification and exporters using permits multiple times, including a handful of companies Fourie runs with his partners. (Fourie denies he’s used permits multiple times.)
Fourie isn’t the only member of his family who’s been in trouble with the law, Louw says, her face lit by the glow of the computer screen as we scan her seemingly endless database. Back in 2007, customs officials at New Zealand’s Auckland International Airport caught his son Billy, the boy pictured on his office wall, attempting to sneak 44 parrot eggs into the country in a specially made pocketed vest under his clothes. He pleaded guilty and was fined $20,000.
Louw says the Fouries’ past involvement in wildlife smuggling should disqualify them from trading animals altogether. “You’re a trafficker. You cannot export animals anymore legally, end of story,” she fumes. “But that’s not how it works around here.”
“Regulators don’t know the tricks of the trade. Only people involved know that.”
‘A Good Business’
During my meeting with Fourie at his home in Nigel, he spends more than an hour talking about his parrot business. “There’s a lot of very, very big customers,” Fourie says, exhaling a cloud of vapor. “Most of our birds go to the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, Malaysia, Indonesia.”
Pet buyers want young, impressionable birds (identifiable by their black-colored eyes rather than the light grey of adulthood), so they can form a close bond with their pets and get them talking early. At $440 a bird, Fourie’s African greys sell faster than Taylor Swift tickets — he can’t fill all his current orders. “If I can get 2,000 African grey babies, I can send it [sic] out tomorrow.” Transporting greys is more challenging than exporting other commodities, he says. “Live animals are a very risky business — it’s not like selling shoes. Your shoe cannot die.” Nonetheless, Fourie says, grinning, it’s “a good business.”
Especially good until nearly a decade ago, when it was legal for breeders in South Africa, which has no wild African greys, and elsewhere to buy them from traders in countries such as Cameroon and the DRC. Wild birds are cheaper and easier to breed — captives take at least four years to become sexually mature, requiring expensive veterinary care, food, and shelter.
Fourie scoffs at the concern about African greys disappearing in the wild. “They will never finish the greys in the Congo,” he says, because the country is so big. “There are some areas a human being has never been — that’s how big it is.” And those jungles are full of “thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of African greys.”
In truth, nobody knows how many greys there are in the war-torn DRC — surveying has been too difficult — but scientists suspect the trend is consistent with other parts of Africa. Just decades ago, millions of African greys flew in dense flocks, prattling in high-pitched screams and whistles, but they now may number no more than a few hundred thousand, says the World Parrot Trust’s Rowan Martin. In 2016, a study found grey parrot populations in the forests of Ghana had plummeted by 90 to 99 percent since the early 1990s. “It was unimaginable to people 50 years ago that this species could ever be threatened with extinction,” Martin says. “Yet wild populations have collapsed in our lifetime in no small part due to the human desire to keep birds in cages.”
Conservationists concluded that there was no way to regulate a legal trade for the parrots in countries where borders are porous, governance is weak, and resources for wildlife protection are minimal. The IUCN’s 2016 classification of African greys as endangered effectively banned all international commercial trade of wild-caught greys and tightened regulations for legal trading of captive-raised ones.
African greys are loaded on top of luggage en route to a rescue center.
Karine Aigner
Fourie says suspicions that some wildlife businesses in South Africa are laundering wild African greys through legal export channels is nonsense. (And when later sent a long list of fact-checking questions, Fourie wrote off the whole premise of this investigation as “bullshit.”) Then, he adds, perhaps to deflect my attention, that he knows people in the DRC who are smuggling significant numbers of African greys directly to customers abroad. Fourie mentions Martin Byart and another Kinshasa trader, Alex Kalala, both of whom have lobbied to lift the ban on trading wild-caught parrots while maintaining that they are adhering to the 2016 prohibition. Fourie worked closely with them in the 1990s when he and his veterinarian traveled to the DRC several times to buy wild African greys to sell to breeders for their stock. But when Byart and Kalala established businesses in South Africa, Fourie says, “they cut us out.”
The DRC’s legal industry is finished because of the wild-parrot trade ban, Fourie says, waving his vape, so “they’re smuggling to other countries.” (Byart and Kalala did not respond to questions about Fourie’s accusations.) Fourie says he hasn’t worked with Byart and Kalala for years, but they remain good friends and stay in contact. A few months after my visit with Fourie, he sends me — inexplicably, perhaps absentmindedly — a WhatsApp exchange with Kalala, in which Kalala says, “No I don’t have a Grey at the moment! But I have many more another [sic] birds!”
I ask Fourie if illegal activity with wild parrots in the DRC and other countries could put the legal parrot business in South Africa in jeopardy because regulations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) could be tightened further. “If they know about it,” he says, referring to officials at the CITES headquarters in Switzerland, but “CITES people are so stupid, and South African government people, they don’t know the tricks of the trade. Only people involved know that.”
The scale of the burgeoning egg trade, says the World Parrot Trust, is “staggering.”
Lately, live-bird traders like Fourie may be losing market share to a new illicit trade: smuggling eggs, which are easier to hide. A 35-year-old Thai man was convicted in January 2025 after he collected 72 parrot eggs from various bird farms around Johannesburg, tucked them inside a black thermal bag with two attached power banks, spirited them through South Africa’s airport security, and flew to Hong Kong. Forensic testing revealed that more than half the eggs were African grey parrots, along with eggs from five species of macaws — collectively worth more than $153,000. No birds survived, and the man was sentenced to 39 months in prison. Two years earlier, a local Hong Kong man got 16 months in prison for importing 62 parrot eggs on a flight from Johannesburg. And this June, 11 people were indicted in the Taiwan Strait’s Matsu Islands in connection with allegedly smuggling more than 4,500 parrot eggs to China. It appears that the eggs of African greys, colorful macaws, graceful cockatoos, and other exotic parrot species were smuggled from Thailand and Vietnam to be hatched in Taiwan, then loaded on ships to China. The scale of the burgeoning egg trade, says the World Parrot Trust’s Martin, is “staggering.”
Where the Caged Birds Sing
Fourie takes me on a tour of his facility. He shows me through a glass door to one of two quarantine buildings, where his birds are monitored for signs of disease before export. We’re met by deafening squawking, Raaaaak! Rak! There are eight rooms lined with small cages containing chicks — African greys, macaws, and cockatoos. Some are only four weeks old and still featherless. Others at almost 12 weeks approach the age when they’ll be less likely to be sold as pets; older birds are bought for breeding. When the quarantine is finished (21 to 30 days, depending on the importing country), a veterinarian examines the birds. With a certificate of good health, they’re cleared for shipment.
Fourie takes pride in cleanliness. The birds drink from bowls of filtered water. Their food dishes are freshly washed, and the floors beneath the cages have new wood chips. The building doesn’t even smell that bad — there’s a light aroma of cedar shavings and bird urine. He shows me around the rest of the property — the office where an employee is doing paperwork; the freezers where he keeps chicken meat to feed the tigers and lions; the quarantine areas where he can hold large animals like hippos, zebras, and giraffes; new showers and toilets for his workers; a row of large plywood shipping boxes punctured with breathing holes for transporting lions; small cats called servals that hiss when we come close; five lions on order from a private Thailand zoo in a fenced enclosure. “Look how fat they are,” Fourie says, taking a drag. “They’ve got a nice life.” When he approaches two tigers he keeps as pets, the cats purr and moan, rubbing against the enclosure. “Hallo, kat. Hallo, poeskat (pussycat),” Fourie coos, scratching their muzzles through the fencing.
If I’m free this afternoon, he asks, he’ll make arrangements for me to see his other quarantine facility, about 30 miles north in Boksburg, run by his business partner, Coetzer. “Let me phone Eddie.”
A captured parrot had its feathers plucked so it wouldn’t fly away. The bird died soon after being rescued.
Karine Aigner
An hour later, I find Coetzer, a tall, lean 40-year-old with a sharp nose and short, ash-blond hair, sitting at a wooden desk in a room with terracotta-tile floors and walls covered with mounted zebra and antelope heads. Coetzer says most clients order a mix of bird species, “but if we can’t give them the African greys, they cancel the other birds as well.”
He says they can buy greys legally only from any of the 200 or so registered South African breeders. Some have as many as a thousand pairs of African greys producing baby birds. When the chicks are a few weeks old, they’re fitted with tiny metal anklets, or “rings,” bearing letter-number codes, similar to the serial numbers on guns, that identify the business where they were hatched and hand-raised. The rings must be loose enough for the chick to grow without the metal cutting into their leg — but not so loose that they can easily be removed or tampered with. A veterinarian and an airport inspector check the birds’ rings against a list on the export permit like one Coetzer shows me for a batch of about 90 birds going to Dubai the following week. They look at “every bird’s leg,” he says. He assures me that all of the birds in the quarantines have rings.
But as I walk through the rooms lined with cages, I see some parrots with bare ankles. When I leave Coetzer, I zoom in on my photographs and videos from both quarantine locations and confirm it. At a nearby gas station in Boksburg, I meet up with Eugene Swart, a retired Green Scorpion agent who participated in the confiscation of Fourie’s birds in 2018. Swart tells me that the evidence he uses to detect smuggled parrots includes birds behaving nervously, suggesting they’re wild, fraudulent paperwork, and loose or missing leg bands. Examining the photos of Fourie’s parrots without anklets, he says this means one of two things: Either those birds have been bought from unregistered breeding facilities, or they’ve been poached from the wild in another country. “In both cases,” Swart says, “they are illegal.”
When asked about the birds without leg bands in their quarantines, both Fourie and Coetzer, who says as of right after my visit he’s no longer associated with Fourie, reply that those birds would then be microchipped, another method that’s sometimes used to identify birds being traded. Experts and authorities I speak with, however, insist that bands are key to prevent malfeasance. “In rare cases, microchips are used,” Swart says, “but 99.9 percent [of the time], these birds are from outside the legal framework.”
In Their Natural Habitat
I want to see wild parrots in the forests of the DRC, but days before my flight to Kinshasa, the capital, shots ring out as dozens of men dressed in military fatigues fire rifles and submachine guns in an attempt to overthrow President Félix Tshisekedi’s government. Six people are killed and 50 arrested, including three U.S. citizens. Concerned about safety, I text the driver I’ve hired to meet me at the airport. “Everything is quiet and calm for the moment,” he responds.
I make my way to the rural town of Kindu, the capital of Maniema province, a two-hour flight east from Kinshasa. There, John and Terese Hart have a house surrounded by a big white fence and gardens. Terese, with short bobbed grey hair, is a petite woman whose wardrobe varies from colorful sleeveless blouses, pencil skirts, and black Mary Jane shoes for meetings with government dignitaries to field pants, cotton tank tops, and floppy sun hats for days in the bush. John, who has hearing aids, glasses, and white hair swooped off his forehead, is rarely found without his earth-tone cargo pants and Crocs.
Poachers demonstrate placing squawking parrots in trees to lure wild ones.
Karine Aigner
The couple have been working in the DRC for more than 50 years. Their accomplishments are impressive. They’ve discovered a new species of monkey, the lesula, and helped create a nearly 2.2-million-acre national park where elusive bonobos, okapi, and forest elephants roam. Now in their seventies, they say their urgent priority is halting the trade in African grey parrots. They’ve been tracking populations in Maniema and two other provinces that encompass a third of the birds’ home territory in the DRC. “This is an iconic bird,” John tells me over a Mützig beer in a little grass hut overlooking the Lualaba River. The African grey is even pictured on Congolese currency, he says, “but it’s being decimated.” In 2024, he found evidence of more than 17,000 African greys poached from the wild being transited through just one airport in Tshopo province: Kisangani Bangoka International. The Harts’ surveys and interviews with villagers show that greys are trafficked in ways similar to what they’ve seen before with elephant ivory. “The fundamental difference,” he says, “is you have to keep these birds alive. You can’t just store them away for later.”
The pipeline begins in the forest. To capture parrots, poachers scale trees up to a hundred feet high, coating branches with homemade glue or grabbing chicks from nests in cavities. The weakest parrots die during days-long journeys by dugout and motorbike to ports where — often still sticky, and missing feathers — the traumatized birds are sold for about $10 each to middlemen. The birds pass through many more hands before they’re sold to exporters for 20 times as much.
One night, with a blood-red moon hanging low, I arrive at the Harts’ office near Kindu’s lumberyard. Rhythmic music and singing floats on a light breeze. Nearby, families gather around fires, women sell eggs at the roadside, and men socialize at a bar in the glow of a neon light. I park myself in a plastic chair in the driveway and wait for the parrots. Three birds confiscated from smugglers in Kibombo are being brought here on a nine-hour, bumpy ride by motorbike.
At about 9 o’clock, a motorcycle rolls through the entrance. Two live chickens dangle from the handlebars, and on the back is a loosely woven wicker basket. The rider unwraps the covering used to shield the birds from road dust and passes them off to the Harts’ small team, which tucks them into clean cages with sugar water, fruit, and corn. To thwart bird thieves, the parrots will be protected by a round-the-clock armed guard.
A parrot trapper prepares to climb into a tree.
Karine Aigner
Glue-covered sticks are placed into trees to catch the birds.
Karine Aigner
If the newly arrived parrots recover from their ordeal, which included having their flight feathers crudely cut to prevent them from getting away, they’ll eventually join a flock of caged birds being rehabilitated at a parrot conservation center established by the Harts in Dingi village, a day’s journey by motorized dugout. At Dingi, parrots regrow their wing feathers and regain their strength, and one by one, they fly free, crimson tail feathers glowing brilliantly in the sun.
A few times a year, the Harts host events so local officials can help release parrots back into the wild. “We’re never going to out-confiscate this trade,” John says — it’s “too vast and too complex.”
‘Going More Underground’
Even though the international trade in African greys has been banned for nearly a decade, until August the DRC had no comprehensive national law prohibiting their capture, transport, and sale within its borders. In that vacuum, traffickers have thrived — helped by bribable officials, desperate communities, weak oversight in remote regions, and the instability of armed conflict. The country’s environment minister has now signed a landmark national law officially closing the grey parrot trade, despite heavy pressure from those who profit from it. Yet few expect the decree alone to end trafficking. Terese calls it an important step, but adds, “There’s no question, it will somehow continue … going more underground.”
John and Terese Hart house rescued animals in the rural town of Kindu.
Karine Aigner
One tactic smugglers use is passing off African greys as species that can still be legally exported, such as green and red-fronted parrots. In August 2024, authorities in Turkey seized 252 greys falsely declared as green parrots smuggled from Kinshasa on Turkish Airlines — identified in 2019 as “the poachers’ airline of choice” by the nonprofit World Animal Protection because of the carrier’s association with wildlife seizures. The birds were bound for Iraq and Thailand, major hubs for live-animal trading. (Turkish Airlines did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Harts and the World Parrot Trust urged officials with the Turkish and Congolese wildlife-management authorities to repatriate the birds to the DRC, and Turkish Airways agreed to fly them back to Kinshasa at no cost. But when wooden crates crammed with greys arrived in November 2024, there were only 113 living birds, 13 others having died on the flight. An investigation by the DRC authorities found they were exported illegally by a member of the National League of Congolese Wildlife Exporters, an organization representing the interests of the country’s commercial animal industry. That group has been led by Gideon Fourie’s associate, Martin Byart.
Byart is based in Kinshasa — a megacity of 17 million, with gleaming high-rise buildings, French patisseries, and designer stores standing in stark contrast to sprawling slums where millions live in corrugated-metal and tarpaulin shacks with no clean water. I meet him in one of the poorer parts of town, at a yellow house with a concrete courtyard on a dirt street. His Aston Martin, à la 007, is parked in the courtyard.
Imposing in a black button-down, black pants, and pointy black shoes, he sits with three colleagues. He demands to know why I’ve come to the Congo to talk about African grey parrots. I tell him I’d like to understand why the parrots have become endangered. Byart, like Fourie, insists that African greys aren’t declining. “There’s no scientific proof,” he says. He strongly believes the grey-parrot trade should be wide open, but he says he hasn’t traded greys since the ban. To emphasize the point, Byart shows me around the property’s empty aviaries.
When I mention there are people who say he’s one of those in the DRC who are smuggling parrots, he shoots back, “Où est la preuve?” Where’s the proof?
Businessman Martin Byart trades animals in the DRC.
Searching for Clues
Hoping to uncover proof of smuggling, I find myself crouching in the back of a car one day in February, keeping my head low so no one can see me watching Gideon Fourie’s colleagues arrive at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport with his shipment of nearly 90 parrots headed for Dubai. Eugene Swart, who made special arrangements for us to be here, moves into position as soon as the wooden crates clear inspection.
As yet, efforts to find clear evidence of a large-scale African grey laundering operation in South Africa’s parrot-breeding industry have yielded nothing. But University of Colorado-Boulder microbiologist Valerie McKenzie is developing a forensic tool that could be transformational — and she’s letting us try it.
Just as we humans have more diverse gut microbiomes if we have healthy lives, spending time outdoors and eating a mix of many different types of nutritious foods, wild parrots eating fruits and nuts in the forest have more diverse microbiomes than parrots raised in a building, fed commercial bird seed, and medicated with antibiotics. Analyzing the makeup and variety of greys’ gut microbes can provide insights about where the birds spend time — at large in the wild, or getting shuffled along a black-market trade route, or sitting in a cage at a bird farm.
The airport inspector examines Fourie’s paperwork and looks over the mesh-covered crates. He doesn’t open them to examine their leg bands — the birds would fly out. The crates filled with squawking birds are then stacked on a pallet and forklifted into a holding area. There, Swart snaps on blue neoprene gloves and uses swabs attached to dowel rods to poke inside four crates for clumps of fresh feces. He collects about a dozen samples, plopping each into a vial of special solution for preserving biological material.
It will be four months until we hear the results from McKenzie, who finds one “highly suspicious” sample in Fourie’s shipment and a second in another shipment we tested from a different company. The microbiomes in the questionable samples resemble those of wild parrots, she says, a promising finding, though not enough to prove a crime at this early stage of the technique’s development. (When presented with these findings, Fourie expressed doubt about the credibility of the test.) As the method advances, says the World Parrot Trust’s Martin, it could help catch and convict traffickers. It could be a “game changer.”
At Dingi, parrots regrow wing feathers and regain strength, and one by one, they fly free.
To see where many parrots leaving Africa are going, I head to Dubai to visit Al Warsan — the biggest bird marketplace in the United Arab Emirates. Here, far from the city’s gold and diamond market, luxurious marinas brimming with shops and restaurants, and the world’s tallest building, Emiratis and expats buy their family pets. Men in long white coats called kandura and women in flowing black abaya browse with children, hoping to take home a kitten, goldendoodle, python, canary, fish — or an African grey parrot.
I track down the address where Fourie sent his shipment: Parrot World Birds Trading, Block 3, Shop Number 10. The store manager, who gives only his first name, Noushad, tells me he’s fresh out of African greys today — they’re so popular he can’t keep them in stock — but he’s expecting a new batch soon. He promises to text me when they arrive. Very few other shops I visit have African greys for sale. Among the ones that do, the average price is about $600. One shop owner offers me a $200 discount because his grey has been plucking its feathers.
“He’s angry,” he tells me. “Stressed out because he wants a mate.”
In the nearby emirates of Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, I hear the same refrain from shopkeepers: We’re waiting for greys. Maybe in a couple of days, or next week. I text Fourie that there’s currently a dearth of greys in the UAE markets. He replies, “I can supply them.”
I ask shop owners where their grey parrots come from. Most say South Africa; some aren’t sure. One manager in Abu Dhabi says he won’t buy from South Africa anymore — too many sick greys.
In Sharjah’s indoor-outdoor animal market, I see a canary face down in its food bowl, dead, and a nearly featherless grey parrot panting behind the glass of a locked storefront. Around the corner, the windows of Shop 34 are covered with newspaper, and the front door is sealed with a sticker stating that tampering with it is a crime. Moiz Jarral, the manager of the shop next door, Al Taghreed Birds & Animal Trading, says he thinks the owner of Shop 34 was selling illegal parrots, and he suspects several other shops at his end of the market may be doing the same. I ask him about the African greys without ankle rings I’ve seen in shops, including one just down the hall. “If any of the birds don’t have the ring, it will not be considered a legal bird,” he says. “If a bird doesn’t have a ring, you can’t keep it.” The government will confiscate it.
Jarral texts me when he gets his next shipment of African greys, 30 “pieces” from Fourie. They’re snapped up in days.
Parrots — likely ones that had been recently released — on a tree at the rescue center in Dingi.
Karine Aigner
Back in Dubai, I meet Canary Land owner Hameed Shraim — “Dubai’s answer to Dr. Dolittle,” according to Emirates Today. Many visitors to his shop aren’t so enamored. With more than 70 one-star reviews detailing “horrible conditions,” including filthy cages and sick birds, Canary Land is widely considered a grim example of animal abuse. One reviewer calls it a “graveyard for animals.” Another writes, “Allah will punish u for what u do.”
Shraim’s store is tucked between a vegetarian Indian restaurant and a dog groomer. The 51-year-old Jordanian is defensive about his bad reviews. The animals in bad shape were abandoned by customers moving abroad who couldn’t travel with them because they didn’t have paperwork to show they’re legal, Shraim says.
Parrots and other larger animals tucked in cages line one wall. A two-foot-long green iguana is stacked atop a barking black and white “pomchi,” a pomeranian-chihuahua mix, apparently being boarded while its owner is in England for several months. There are some large, black ravens, two nesting macaws shielded from view, and four pairs of African greys in cages, their floors coated with excrement. Several are trembling and missing clumps of feathers on their chests and bodies. One has lost almost its entire wing, maybe from plucking at it. A sign on the wall instructs “No photographs” — a measure, Shraim says, to prevent unwanted visitors from posting pictures with bad reviews.
I ask him if online influencers have been a boost to business. In the past, he says, people like him would sell only the pet-shop basics — rabbits, hamsters, fish, turtles, kittens — but today’s customers, primed by what they see on social media, are often in the market for more unusual and exotic animals.
“If you need to be famous,” he says, “you need to have something strange.”
