Feather forensics: tracing the origins of parrots in wildlife trade with stable isotopes and citizen science

Wild-caught parrots are sometimes laundered into trade as captive-bred. Using a citizen-science campaign that collected thousands of feathers from wild and captive birds across South Australia, we show stable isotope analysis can distinguish captive from wild origin with up to 90% accuracy in galahs and 74% accuracy in other parrot species.