The Quandary of Captive Birds and Conserving Wild Populations
Late one evening, soon after I had arrived in Australia for a sabbatical, I was out strolling with my daughter through a Sydney park, seeking relief from the summer humidity, when something yellow on the ground caught my eye. We stopped to take a look. It was a bird – small, disheveled, its feathers neon bright in the glare of a nearby lamppost. The creature appeared out of place, vaguely pecking at the grass, but when it pitched forward clumsily, it was clear it needed help.
My daughter and I debated what to do. Should we capture it? How? Even if we could, what would we do with it? Other people walked past, deep in conversation, unaware of the drama unfolding inches from their feet. Lacking my glasses, I tapped “lostt brid rexsue?” into my phone’s search app and snapped a location photo just as the bird abruptly rose and flapped unsteadily into a tree, high out of reach.
My first reaction was relief. Though it looked ill, the bird – a budgie, I ascertained from Google – had shown it could fly. Was that not also proof it could fend for itself? I would not have known how to care for it in any case, nor where to find a vet at that hour. Nonetheless, my relief quickly morphed into guilt. “Poor Howard,” my daughter murmured, having already given it a name. “He’s not going to make it.”
This incident marked the start of my deeper exploration into the world of “avian escapees and budgie snugglers” – the seemingly endless stream of messages in the “lost and found birds sydney And Surrounding Areas” Facebook group, as many as 20 or 30 per day in inner Sydney alone. Posts like mine, announcing the sighting of an apparent pet, were in the minority, far outnumbered by communiqués from owners in desperate search of their “Cupcake,” “Bobo,” or “baby boy GUCCI.” Who were all these birds on the lam, I wondered, and what of the “budgie snugglers” – humans who cherish birds’ companionship but express their devotion in welded mesh and galvanized wire?
Flaco’s Fly for Freedom
It was around the time of my encounter with the ill-starred yellow budgie that another, much larger member of the Aves class was making international headlines: Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl (Bubo bubo), had reached the one-year anniversary of his escape from New York’s Central Park Zoo. His clandestine release by an unknown individual in February 2023 had not been without controversy; zoo officials and many others feared for Flaco’s safety and characterised his liberation as a criminal act.
Still, even those who felt he would be better off in captivity found it hard to resist the spectacle of an apex predator with a two-meter wingspan soaring through Central Park, flexing his freedom for the first time. Aside from possible surprise at a blink of his huge yellow eyes, those who visited Flaco while he was still in the zoo may have found the experience little different from looking at well-rendered taxidermy. Hearing him hoot for hours from city rooftops or watching him preening in the park, however, inspired familiarity and awe, even for those who only saw him secondhand through video clips. “Yay our friend Flaco,” commented a typical YouTube viewer.
Comparatively unknown during his 13 years of confinement, Flaco had catapulted to the all-time Who’s Hoo of Bubo bubos only as a result of his scrappy, year-long urban survival odyssey outside of the zoo. Observing the outpouring of public responses to his death, from national news reports and editorials on its meaning to heartfelt online odes and handmade portraits left at the base of Flaco’s favorite oak, I was struck by the intensity of people’s sense of loss. “You moved us all, we loved you so much. We are so glad you had a year of freedom,” wrote one of the many mourners who left messages by the tree.
The comparison with the discourse on the “lost and found birds sydney” Facebook group was jarring. Flaco had been on display for over a decade but was only truly seen and appreciated when he was free. By contrast, the distraught back-and-forth about avian escapees like “Mango,” “Rex,” and “Bluey” suggested that captivity was intrinsic to their value, and without it their existence was futile and finite.
The Universal Human Desire for Connection
As is the case with most other-than-human species, the perception of a bird’s worth and right to autonomy is directly proportionate to the function it fulfills for people. The outlooks of budgie snugglers and freedom-loving Flaco fans can be understood as expressions of the universal human desire for closeness and connection with other beings.
For many, Flaco’s year of ecological autarky made him an icon of liberty and self-determination and reinforced commonly held anthropomorphic ideas about the special entitlement of predators to live unfettered. The discussion on the lost-and-found Facebook group, on the other hand, emphasizes birds’ bonds with their owners and penchant for kisses and cuddles. Juxtaposed thus, the outlooks of budgie snugglers and freedom-loving Flaco fans would seem at utter variance. Yet they can also be understood as expressions of humans’ innate interest in “the big wide world . . . of bumptious life,” to use Donna Haraway’s phrase, and of the universal human desire for closeness and connection with other beings, feathered or otherwise.
Flaco’s decision to stay in Central Park and roost next to a well-trafficked road, despite being theoretically able to go anywhere, made it easy to observe him in action. Having been on exhibit his entire life, he was apparently untroubled by the parade of onlookers below his branch, snapping pics and aahing as he fluffed his feathers and swiveled his head. Proximity and predictability alone do not a relationship make, but this more than anything is what made people love Flaco: His nearness fostered knowingness and felt like intimacy.
Pet birds’ interactions with their owners likewise serve as evidence of amity, though they have less say in the matter. Uncertainty over the true nature of their attachment – sincere or merely transactional? – may explain the anxious subtext beneath bird owners’ lost-and-found Facebook posts: Does the fact of their birds’ escape suggest they were never really close after all?
The Ethical Practice of Care
Posts on the lost-and-found group show this practice of care playing out multiple times a day. Passersby notice a bird where it would not normally be and take it upon themselves to report it or even transport it to a vet, making it possible for the bird to be reunited with its owner. Why is it so easy to care about exceptional birds like Flaco or parrots that elude their owners, but so much harder to feel comparable passion towards birds’ survival on a larger scale?
This impulse extends to wild birds as well. Although the Facebook group’s raison d’être is linking pets and their keepers, people consult the page when they do not know where else to turn. One recent discussion thread, for example, involved an ailing lorikeet that turned out not to be a pet, as the person who spotted it assumed, but a wild bird suffering from Lorikeet Paralysis Syndrome (LPS). Guided by members of the group, the individual was eventually able to capture and deliver it to a wildlife rehabilitator.
The newly launched Americas Flyways Initiative (AFI), a multilateral partnership between the US-based National Audubon Society, BirdLife International, and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, could take a page from the “Feathered Lives Also Count” (FLACO) Act and avian pin-ups playbook to advertise their efforts. Ambitious and potentially transformative, the initiative aims to monitor and protect migratory birds on a hemispheric scale through extragovernmental coordination of national policymaking, sustainable development, and private-sector investment. To succeed in gaining attention and mobilizing pressure on flyway nations, the initiatives’ organizers could use a dose of identifiable-victim viral star power.
Expanding our Avian Attachments
Building public support for flora and fauna that most people will never see is no easy task. Conservation advocates increasingly seek to counter the problem through whimsical branding campaigns that spotlight particular birds, beasts, or causes, and foster a sense of stakeholdership, even if only fleeting. Initiatives like the long-running Cockatoo Wingtag / Big City Birds project in Sydney, which allows participants to report sightings and activities of tagged urban birds, have been remarkably enduring in developing awareness of cities as spaces of avian coexistence.
For budgie snugglers committed to keeping birds close, projects like Cockatoo Wingtag could take the place of cages. They can continue looking after their pet parrots while also advocating for psittacines in the wild. As a voting bloc, parrot owners are arguably the best positioned to push for policies that support avian conservation, as they know better than most how full and rich every individual bird’s life can be.
Beyond the celebrity escapees or “identifiable victims” that grab our attention, we must snuggle the species and spaces around us, acknowledge our interconnectedness, and take meaningful action. By harnessing people’s curiosity about birds and providing opportunities for connection, initiatives like the AFI and Cockatoo Wingtag can foster a more expansive understanding of our shared environmental fate. Bird owner or not, it is incumbent on all of us to embrace a multifaceted approach to environmental altruism – for the sake of Flaco, Howard, and the countless other feathered lives that also count.
