CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – A pigeon that has declared Australia a biosafety risk could get a reprieve after a US bird organization declared its identifying legband fake.
The group suggested that the bird found in a backyard in Melbourne on December 26 was a pigeon that had left the US state of Oregon two months earlier, 3,000 miles away.
Based on this, Australian authorities on Thursday said they considered the bird a disease risk and planned to kill it.
But Deone Roberts, sports development manager of the American Racing Pigeon Union, which is based in Oklahoma, said the group is fake.
The band number belongs to a blue bar pigeon in the United States and it is not the bird proposed in Australia, she said.
“The bird group in Australia is imitative and cannot be traced,” Roberts said. “It definitely has a home in Australia and not in the US”
“Someone has to look at the group and then understand that the bird is not from the US. They do not have to kill him,” she added.
Counterfeiting bird droppings “is happening more and more,” Roberts said. “People who enter the hobby buy it unconsciously.”
Pigeon racing has seen an increase in popularity, and some birds have become very valuable. A Chinese pigeon fan lowered a record price of 1.6 million euros ($ 1.9 million) for a Belgian bred pigeon in November.
The Australian Department of Agriculture did not immediately say on Friday whether the fake bone band had changed its plans to kill the bird.
The department said on Thursday that the pigeon “may not stay in Australia” because it could “harm the food security of Australia and our wild bird population.”
“This poses a direct biosafety risk to Australian bird life and our poultry industry,” the department said in a statement.
Melbourne resident Kevin Celli-Bird, who found the emaciated bird in his backyard, was surprised by the development and was delighted that the bird he named Joe, after the elected US president, might not be destroyed.
“Yes, I’m glad about that,” Celli-Bird said, referring to news that Joe was probably not a threat to biosafety.
Celli-Bird contacted the American Racing Pigeon Union to find the owner of the bird based on the number on the leg strap. The straps have a number and a symbol, but Celli-Bird did not remember the symbol and said he could no longer catch the bird because it had recovered from its initial weakness.
The bird spends every day in the backyard, sometimes with a native pigeon on a pergola. Celli-Bird feeds it to the pigeon food within days of arrival. “I think he just decided he was home since I gave him some food and a drink,” he said.
Australian quarantine authorities are notorious. In 2015, the government threatened to kill two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, after they were smuggled into the country by Hollywood star Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard.
Faced with a 50-hour deadline to leave Australia, the dogs made it into a chartered plane.