New NH law for the birds

Image by soonerpa

On Saturday, the state’s most notorious illegal pet bird species, the Quaker parrot, also called the monk parakeet, became legal.

“From the perspective of a business owner, we’re happy,” said Alan Fox, owner of Bird Supply of New Hampshire on Amherst Street in Nashua.

“Parakeets are very popular. People like them because they’re chatty and relatively inexpensive.”

The small, colorful birds are viewed as feathered pests by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is concerned about them escaping and becoming established in the wild, as has happened in a number of places as close as coastal Connecticut.

New Hampshire prohibited ownership of the birds as of 1998, but the ban was little known and caused a furor earlier in the year when Suzanne Burke, of Nashua, who owned up to 20 parakeets, was told by the Fish and Wildlife Service to dispose of them or surrender them to the state.

The subsequent debate led to the Legislature passing a law, eventually signed by Gov. John Lynch, that made Myiopsitta monachus, to give the bird its Latin name, legal in New Hampshire.

Burke sold most of her parakeets in order to focus on breeding cats.

“I’m glad that all the birds I sold are legal and now the owners don’t have to worry about it,” Burke said. “It makes me happy to know that there was a favorable outcome.”

The publicity about Burke’s situation raised questions about why the seemingly harmless pet birds were on Fish and Wildlife’s list of prohibited species when they were commonly sold in pet stores that had been inspected and approved by the state Department of Agriculture.

It turned out that the pet store inspections covered the conditions in which animals were kept and sold, not whether they were allowed in the state.

Representatives at the state’s wildlife division argued against ownership of the parakeets because of their notorious history of having established feral populations, causing problems with agriculture and electrical grids because of the large nests they like to build on transformers.

“If monk parakeets were to become established in the ‘wild’ in New Hampshire, as they have in suburban Chicago and New York City, we could count on similar problems here,” Glenn Normandeau, executive director of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, said in his editorial letter published in The Telegraph on Feb. 20.

Quaker parrots, or monk parakeets, were the only bird on the list of species designated as prohibited, meaning they couldn’t be brought into the state, sold or owned.

Massachusetts outlawed the birds around the same time as New Hampshire, but later deemed them legal after establishing that the birds wouldn’t survive so far north in the winter.

Fox said the birds sell on average for $250-$1,000. With the exception of more rare subspecies, parakeets are inexpensive compared with other, larger parrots.

Fox said he didn’t believe the parrot subspecies was dangerous.

“They can’t survive during the winter, and we clip the wings of every bird we sell, so they have a hard time flying away,” he said.