Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. And we really appreciate it.Ĭopyright © 2021 NPR. Thank you, Kimon, for bringing us this interesting report. KING: Kimon de Greef is a freelance reporter based in New York. And he said he'd been working towards it for three years. I met a guy who had just become king of the park several months ago, and he was sort of in shock.
But there's potentially really good money in here because it's also a big status thing if you own a champion finch and you become king of the park. And a champion bird can sell for between 3,000 and, I've heard, $9,000. And the bird species known in Guyana as the towa towa bird, in certain areas where demand is high - so around the capital city, Georgetown, for example, the reports are that you used to see these birds flying around everywhere, and now they've thinned out because of demand both in Guyana and in the United States.
There are reports of finches dying on the journey. The finches don't come out of this in the best shape always. KING: What is the actual harm that finch smugglers are doing? Like, why do the federal authorities care so much.ĭE GREEF: My understanding is that one of the main concerns is around the risk of avian diseases. These guys have created a kind of diaspora ritual around doing this in New York. This is what their parents did in Guyana when they were growing up. They work in construction or putting air conditioners in hospitals during the pandemic. Guys that I spoke to, they're working-class men mostly. When you interviewed the men in Queens and you asked them about the importance culturally, what did they tell you? What did these competitions mean?ĭE GREEF: Well, it was pretty interesting that this is the wildlife trade driven by a diaspora who are taking a tradition from home to a new landscape. And he said it's like a jab and a hard punch, you know, like a combo - one, two - and that the rival would hear that and maybe stop to get its breath and lose the race. One guy was describing his bird's song to me. And the first bird to hit 50 is judged the winner. And there's two referees who stand, and they count bursts of birdsong. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Thirty-eight, 39.ĭE GREEF: The men gather around them. The song is very sweet, but the birds are actually being quite fierce and saying, get out of my face. These birds, as soon as they see each other, they begin singing to defend their territory they're male birds. They get placed on a metal pole driven into the ground. A finch singing competition is essentially two birds in cages. I say men because it's a very male - very masculine kind of subculture - sport, hobby, whatever you want to call it. The men get together there early in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. KING: Where do the singing competitions happen, and what do they look like?ĭE GREEF: Mostly in New York City at a park in Richmond Hill in Queens. And there is demand among the Guyanese diaspora for these birds for use in these very elaborate and quite secretive singing competitions. KIMON DE GREEF: In the small country of Guyana in South America and several neighboring countries, there's a pretty old tradition of using wild songbirds for singing competitions. I talked to Kimon de Greef, who's reported on what's driving the demand for finches in New York. He stuffed each little bird into an individual hair curler, then taped those curlers inside his jacket and pant legs and then boarded a plane from Guyana to New York City, where he was arrested for wildlife smuggling. Fish and Wildlife Service alleges this curious thing happened.
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