Shas­tri Boodan

The Bird Rac­ing As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BRATT) held its ma­jor bird singing com­pe­ti­tion on Sun­day at the Preysal Recre­ation Ground, Cou­va.

Spokesman Nichelle Sookdeo said 100 peo­ple from across T&T par­tic­i­pat­ed in the event.

She said the com­pe­ti­tion was to de­ter­mine the best singing bullfinch.

She said young birds are classed as brown birds while ma­ture birds are classed as black birds.

Sookdeo said win­ners would get tro­phies. She said the com­pe­ti­tion took two months to or­gan­ise.

Game War­den Steve Seep­er­sad said any­one who owns a bullfinch re­quires a per­mit from the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture.

Seep­er­sad said rear­ing birds for com­pe­ti­tion can be a lu­cra­tive busi­ness.

He said some well trained birds can fetch as high as $80,000.

Seep­er­sad said, “In 2016 the then Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture Clarence Ramb­harat would have made a le­gal no­tice mak­ing it un­law­ful to catch these birds. They are not en­dan­gered but their num­bers in the wild are di­min­ish­ing. It is now law that you need per­mits to keep birds as bullfinch­es, shat, non sil­ver beak and pi­coplats.”

He said no per­mits are need­ed to keep semps and para­keets.

He said. “The il­le­gal pet trade if af­fect­ing the world right now and peo­ple are bring­ing these birds il­le­gal­ly from Venezuela. Most of the bullfinch­es here to­day you would see are from South Amer­i­ca.”

Seep­er­sad said the per­mits are free at the Forestry Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture.

He said af­ter an ap­pli­ca­tion is made an in­spec­tion would be done to ver­i­fy the num­ber of birds that are in pos­ses­sion of the ap­pli­cants.