By Rosemary Low
In May 1930 a ban on the importation of parrots into the UK was brought into force. It had arisen due to psittacosis being found in Amazon parrots. Cases of psittacosis were reported in mid-1929, in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and linked to parrots from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where an ongoing outbreak of the disease had occurred. The disease can be transmitted to humans and 14 people in the UK population of 39 million died soon after as a result. It threw the country into a panic and sadly many parrots were killed or even released.
In the early and mid-20th century, David Seth-Smith was curator of several important private bird collections. He eventually became the curator of birds and mammals at London Zoo and his book, entitled Parrakeets, a Handbook to the Imported Species (1926), was important. A frequent contributor to the Avicultural Magazine, in 1940 he wrote in that journal (page 288) about the effect of the ban a decade later. He commented: “I think we may say that the three main results have been the great increase in the keeping of parakeets, the very considerable progress made in the technique of keeping and breeding them, and the absurd levels to which the price of quite common parrot-like birds has risen.”
Up to 1930, most parrots were bought as pets or for mixed collections in aviaries, often quite large ones. Mortality was high and breeding results were few. Seth-Smith noted: “As Belgium was one of the few countries where no such ban was imposed, the result was, not a severe plague of psittacosis, but merely that prices went down and all sorts of very interesting psittacine birds turned up, in spite of the absence of specialist collectors, such as we have here.” No doubt these rarities would have otherwise gone to dealers in the UK or the Netherlands. He wrote that in Holland the ban was removed in early 1939. When it was still in force, birds were occasionally carried over the frontier at a marshy, foggy spot where the Customs and other frontier officials, for reasons of health, did not care to linger in the night air.