Fowl Play Ruffles Feathers as Cagey Thieves Strike Twice

On a warm night in May, two couples disappeared--simply vanished--from a front porch in the Florence area.

Then Monday morning, a big guy disappeared from the veranda of a home just eight blocks away. He had time to utter only a single yell before the abductor dragged him off.

What investigators have on their hands, said Sheriff’s Detective Mike Bornman solemnly, are “two fowl deeds.”

Five parrots--four plain-wrap variety and one flashy import--have been swiped, cages and all, in two thefts from front porches in the Florence area.

The owners, an 18-year-old man and 12-year-old Jose Melendez, are not exactly wringing their hands waiting for ransom notes, and investigators are operating on the theory that someone is trying to fence these hot avians.

Bornman does not know what the resale market will bear on these birds. Four are green parrots, two males and two females, worth about $65 each, and all stolen along with their four-foot-high cage on East 70th Street on May 31.

Then, in a second incident--and it takes only two to make a crime wave these days--two men, perhaps the same ones, moved uptown in their tastes. Monday morning they stole both a red-crowned Amazon parrot, valued at $450, and its domed black wrought-iron cage, worth another $100--including the little bird swing--from Jose’s front porch on Whitsett Avenue.

The 12-year-old boy had taken the caged bird outside, and as he watched a man walked up boldly, hoisted the huge cage, returned to a sedan driven by a confederate and drove off. The parrot didn’t say a word, recalled Jose. “But he screamed.”

The green parrots evidently had no distinguishing marks. But the Amazon, with its red cap, blue-purple cheeks and green body, shouldn’t be hard to miss, unless it wings it to Hollywood Boulevard, in which case it’ll blend right into the crowd.