Witness Protection

From Atlas Obscura - 

The Strange Tale of Echo, the Parrot Who Saw Too Much

A mob's pet is said to be in hiding. Could the bird be a witness in court?BByLaurel Braitman MARCH 22, 2016

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a strange message. It was imperative, she said, that I get in touch with a guy named Geoffrey Mitchell. Geoffrey lives in the Bay Area and works for Caltrans—the California Department of Public Transportation. But before that, he worked as a marine biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in the swamplands around Lake Charles. 

That’s, he told me, where he heard about the parrot in a witness protection program.

Mitchell’s source was a woman named Suzy Heck, founder and director of an animal rehabilitation center called Heck Haven that takes in roughly 1,000 animals a year. When I called her, Heck explained that usually she rehabs wildlife like injured raccoons or orphaned baby squirrels, but every once in a while a different sort of animal shows up.

One afternoon in the mid-‘90s, she recalls, a wildlife rehabber friend of hers from New Orleans named Corina King arrived with a male parrot in a cage, a beautiful severe macaw—green with red shoulders—named Echo. He was medium-sized, a little thin and knew dozens of words. King told Heck that the bird needed to lay low for a while, and that she should keep his presence at the center a secret.

“It was all very hush hush,” Heck says, “and I didn’t know how long he was going to stay with me.”

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The mystery continues below.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-strange-tale-of-echo-the-parrot-who-saw-too-much?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=0c18cb28e6-Newsletter_3_24_20163_23_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-0c18cb28e6-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_3_24_20163_23_2016)&mc_cid=0c18cb28e6&mc_eid=866176a63f