A rescue in West Warwick took an emergency call in late April and drove to New Hampshire without knowing what was waiting. What came back filled a quarantine wing that did not exist yet.
A Call Nobody Was Ready For
Rhode Island Parrot Rescue is used to intakes. It is not used to intakes that arrive all at once.
In late April the organisation took an emergency call about a hoarding situation across the state line in New Hampshire. Staff got in vehicles and went.
“It was a very last-minute call,” Rosemarie Diaz, the rescue’s animal care manager, told NBC 10 News.
She added the part that most rescue workers will recognise: “I don’t think it was something we were immediately prepared for.”
Inside The Barn
The birds were being kept in a barn. Their owner was living in it alongside them.
They were not caged. They had free roam of the building, which is the detail that explains everything that followed.
Diaz said the conditions inside were no longer safe for the animals. That is a careful sentence, and it is doing a lot of work.
A barn is not a bird room. There is no way to control temperature, ventilation, hygiene or who breeds with whom.
How Seventy-One Happens
Nobody sets out to keep seventy-one parrots. The number is what happens when a small group is given time and no barriers.
“Probably started off with just a few,” Diaz said. “And then because of free roam, they probably ended up just reproducing with each other.”
That is the whole mechanism. A handful of birds, an unsupervised space, and a species that breeds readily when it has cavities and company.
It is worth sitting with how ordinary the beginning was. This did not start as cruelty — it started as a few pets and no plan.
Seventy-One Birds Arrive
The rescue counted 71 birds coming in. Its quarantine area was not built for that.
Staff had to expand it immediately so the new arrivals could be housed and monitored apart from the resident population. That is not optional — an unquarantined intake of unknown health status can take out an entire existing flock.
It is the same principle that applies when you bring home one bird, only at seventy-one times the scale. The biosecurity reset most owners skip exists for exactly this reason, and almost nobody runs it for a single new pet.
Then the medical work began.
Antibiotics, Antifungals, And Four Losses
The parrots went onto a range of medical regimens, including antibiotics and antifungal treatments. Fungal infection is what a warm, damp, poorly ventilated building does to a bird’s respiratory system over time.
Four of the rescued birds did not survive.
That number belongs in this story. A rescue that reports it plainly is a rescue telling you the truth about the other sixty-seven.
Because the rest did turn a corner. “So far, a lot of them look pretty good,” Diaz said. “They’re eating a lot.”
Eating A Lot Is The Whole Point
That line sounds like a throwaway. It is actually the clinical measure that matters most.
A bird that eats is a bird whose weight is stabilising, and weight is the first thing to move in either direction when a parrot is sick or recovering. Appetite returning across a large group is the sign that the intervention worked.
What follows is slower: rebuilding condition on a proper diet after years of whatever was available in a barn. For most rescue birds that means moving off a seed-heavy diet, which is a 30-day project even with one cooperative bird.
Multiply that by sixty-seven.
What Diaz Actually Wants You To Hear
The rescue could have used this story to talk about the owner. It did not.
“If you feel like you’re struggling, we really recommend to reach out to anybody,” Diaz said. “Rescues are willing to help in any way that they can, and we would prefer to help before any situation gets too bad.”
Then, deliberately: “But we do not judge.”
That is a rescue trying to make the next call arrive earlier. Every month someone waits is another clutch, another degree of overcrowding, and a worse outcome for birds that were loved badly rather than not at all.
Where They Go From Here
The goal is rehabilitation and then permanent homes. The rescue is still working through the slow, expensive business of vetting each bird individually.
Sixty-seven parrots will eventually need sixty-seven households that understand what they are taking on — including that a bird raised in a free-roaming colony has never been a single pet in a living room.
If that is a question you have ever turned over yourself, it is worth reading the case for and against keeping a parrot on its own before you apply for one.
Updates on the flock are posted by the rescue on its own channels.
Source: NBC 10 News (WJAR), reported by Ryan Medeiros, 9 May 2026. More about the organisation at Rhode Island Parrot Rescue.