Robbers broke into TV host Mark Morrone’s Parrots of the World pet store and stole $58,000 worth of parrots, including African Greys, Cockatoos, and a Toucan:
Brazen, cage-toting burglars smashed through the rear window of a Rockville Centre pet store early yesterday and made off with 45 exotic birds, worth a total of $58,000, police and the store’s owner said yesterday.
Marc Morrone, the “pet-keeper” for “The Martha Stewart Show,” who has owned Parrots of the World on Sunrise Highway since 1978, told the Daily News the early morning heist was not the work of bird-brained thieves. […]
The bandits stole 20 African Grey parrots, 20 Blue-Faced Amazon parrots, 4 Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and one toucan. The birds retail for $1,200 each.
“This is a terrible tragedy,” Morrone said. “They hurt me emotionally. It’s a personal violation.”
More than his financial loss, Morrone said, he’s worried about the safety of his birds.
Mark Morrone has done so much for animal welfare and education and its such a shame that he was targeted like this.
Here’s a video from YouTube to show you what the store’s bird room looks like and how many birds are typically in there at any given time:
Having been to the store and having met Mark, I can tell you that he is one of the nicest and most sincere people I’ve ever met. He certainly didn’t deserve to have the birds he spent so much time socializing and hand-feeding stolen right out from under him.
The last time I was at Parrots of the World, I found Mark in the expansive bird room, his shirt covered in a mixture of poop and baby bird formula, hand-feeding several parrots. After finishing the morning feedings with the help of his staff, he began to personally great each customer who walked into the store, answering question along the way.
I approached him at one point and asked him about the degus he had for sale. He stopped what he was doing behind the sales counter and came over to the cage of degus on a wall that included possums, hedgehogs, and sugar gliders. He reached into the cage, pulled out a degu, and suddenly put one on my shoulder.
Now, I’ve owned degus before — I adopted a pair of them and had them for 2 years before they succumbed to diabetes after being fed a sugar-inclusive diet of hamster food by their original owners. And they would almost always let me handle them.
But the experience I had in Mark’s pet store was different. He and his staff had handled and socialized this degu so well that not only would it let me hold it, but it climbed across my shoulders, up onto my head, and up and down my back several times, and never tried to get away or jump down to the floor. It was amazing.
And if I didn’t have several other pets at home at the time, I would have bought that degu right there on the spot.
Anyway, my point is that a theft of this magnitude couldn’t have happened to a better person and it just is plain wrong that it did.
If you or someone you know has any information about this crime, please call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. Let’s hope all those birds don’t die in vain as a result of these robbers’ actions.
March 17, 2008 
Add CommentI came to photography from more of a journalistic background (that was my major). I started out documenting events for newspapers and websites, but what really pushed me into photography was 9/11. Cause I was in my dorm room when it happened and one of my first thoughts was to document the event (after the inital shock).
