African Grays Are Tiktok Stars, but There's a Dark Side

African gray parrots are all over the place on TikTok, and no wonder. As Rene Ebersol writes at Rolling Stone, they "have the intelligence of young children and are renowned for their freakish ability to mimic human speech"—hence all those popular videos of the birds doing just that. The investigative story, however, digs into a much darker aspect of this popularity: a thriving black market. Poachers and smugglers across West and Central Africa have returned to trapping wild birds, including nest raiding, egg smuggling, and using glue-traps or nets. Once captured, many young parrots die from trauma, starvation, or stress. Survivors are crammed into tiny crates, transported under horrific conditions, then illegally exported—often with fabricated paperwork or through shady "captive-breeding" loopholes—to buyers worldwide. A single parrot can fetch up to $7,000.

Another source of the birds are commercial farms, aka "bird mills," that raise the parrots in cramped conditions before shipping them out, writes Ebersol, whose piece explores the challenges of stopping the trade in illegal wildlife. "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." Meanwhile, conservation groups quoted in the story warn that wild populations of African grays are dropping—the International Union for Conservation of Nature has designated the birds as "endangered," meaning at risk of imminent extinction. Read the full story.