‘A horror story’: the pet shop in Aston ruffling feathers

Dear readers — exotic birds are not something Birmingham is especially known for. The great Sparkbrook pigeon flock (read all about that here) was the only avian landmark we thought the city had to offer. That is until recently, when Madeleine came across a Facebook group of perturbed parrot enthusiasts bent on exposing an Aston shop for its alleged wrongs against bird-kind.

Scammed by Birds4U is the name of the group in question and the titular shop is at the centre of today's story. We've spoken to an array of customers and a former staff member who claim the shop's owner, Atif Masood, is selling birds that are terrified of humans, riddled with disease, and have clipped wings. One ex-employee described his experience as "horror-story worthy".

As for Masood, he denied the allegations, and told us his business is "as a licensed, registered trader and follows appropriate welfare and isolation protocols". For all the details, read the story in full.

But before that, your Brum in Brief.

Brum in Brief

💰 ‘Bankrupt Birmingham’ is a “thing of the past”, Birmingham’s leader John Cotton declared while unveiling the city council’s new budget yesterday. The draft plans, which will be voted on by the full council later this month, include £130 million investment for cleaner streets, libraries, and youth provision, and a 4.99% council tax hike. Meanwhile, the £300 million budget gap which led to the city’s financial crisis, and the arrival of government-appointed commissioners, has been closed. Cotton called it an “important milestone on our improvement journey.” (BBC).

🥊 But the opposition has other ideas. “This is another tax and cut budget from Birmingham Labour,” said local Conservative leader Robert Alden. “Hitting Brummies with higher taxes while refuse collections are slashed, rubbish sits on the streets, and potholes go unrepaired.”

🚧Kings Heathens are fighting back following the sudden cancellation of phase two of the area’s Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN). Phase one of the controversial scheme was implemented east of the high street, on and around York Road in the early 2020s, prompting outcry from some motorists and prominent voices in local business. The next lot of “traffic-calming” measures set for west of the high street were consulted on in September. However, in an email last month, the council announced the plans could not be implemented due to the “mixed feedback and objections” from over 900 respondents. The cabinet member for transport, Majid Mahmood, emailed residents to tell them that “fundamental changes” were required and “the scheme as originally advertised cannot go ahead”. Revised plans are set to go to consultation next month. Currently, anti and pro LTN residents have organised themselves into opposing Facebook groups, the former has 2.4k members, and the latter 583. 

But the pushback isn’t limited to social media. A group of parents whose children attend Kings Heath Primary School have launched an email campaign to try to pressure Mahmood into going ahead as planned. One mother told us the school had “jumped through loads of hoops” to get the council to sign off on the original measures. In their email to Mahmood, seen by The Dispatch, they argue that the design will enable kids to travel to and from school more safely on foot, supporting the council’s own policies on making neighbourhoods safer and reducing car dependency. They also take aim at the “misleading nature of the consultation and significant flaws” in the analysis. Birmingham city council has been contacted for comment.

💼 Business leaders in Birmingham have agreed to work together to improve the city centre and drive economic growth, replicating similar, successful partnerships in cities like Manchester. The plans involve two Business Improvement Districts — membership bodies representing firms in a specific geographic area — working strategically together with shared goals for the first time. Southside BID (covering Digbeth and Chinatown) and Birmingham Colmore (covering the patch around Colmore Row) will now be acting in tandem to increase footfall in town and to lobby the powers that be on behalf of businesses. Respective chairs Steve Ball and Nicola Fleete-Milne argue that they’ll be a stronger, more efficient force that the government will be less able to ignore and the benefits will improve quality of life for residents. Birmingham Colmore’s CEO, Michele Wilby, said “we are taking the first meaningful step towards levelling the playing field between Birmingham and our regional competitors”. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

🛣️ Walsall and Wolverhampton are ‘lucrative’ hotspots for sex work in the region, with the M6 pulling in punters in their droves. David Walker, a senior manager at Walsall Council, told a recent meeting of the social care committee that women from Birmingham are frequently encountered selling sex in the Black Country locales. “We’ve got the lorry parks, lorry drivers, companies and so on [...] and this is the place where they tend to find the trade,” he said. (Express and Star).

When Lee Tuckett* asked his son James what he wanted for his 13th birthday in 2023, he was overjoyed to hear the answer: a bird. 

His son had inherited Lee’s life-long love of parrots. Their Barnsley four-bed was already home to a blue parrotlet called ‘Mr Bump’ and Lee was more than confident that “gentle-natured” James could care for his own pet. Besides: “I’d rather him have a bird to look after than be looking at a screen,” he jokes. 

So, father and son started trawling online for a tame lovebird, a type of small parrot. It soon became clear, the nearest pet shop selling what they were looking for was 100 miles away, in Newtown, Aston. Birds4U looked “clean” and “genuine”, says Lee, so he sent them a message asking if there were hand-reared lovebirds in stock and received a response within a minute: yes, absolutely. 

Lee and James took the two hour long trip down to Aston. When the worker brought their selected bird out however, the parrot “jumped off onto the floor and ran away.” Looking back now, Lee thinks “alarm bells should have been ringing”, but says he was just “so happy to see James’ face as he looked at his new pet.”

So, he went along with the worker’s explanation that the bird was just nervous, and took Bryan — the “good old fashioned name” James had selected — back to Barnsley. 

Almost as soon as the pair got home, Lee says, they realised they had a problem. Bryan was terrified. 

Lee said: “you could physically see the fear and her heart pumping through her chest. It would jump off [James’] finger at any opportunity and run around on the floor to find a hiding spot,”. No matter how hard either of them tried to bond with her (as a DNA test later revealed, Bryan was also not the male parrot Birds4U claimed), Bryan was petrified of human contact. 

After a few days, she still didn’t settle. Lee began to doubt she’d ever been handled by humans before. He began to look into Birds4U more, and stumbled across social media posts alleging the business clipped the wings of their animals — while legal, it is a highly controversial practice in the bird community — in order to make birds appear tame. Lee realised Bryan had been subject to wing clipping.

“It took around 18 months for the feathers to grow back,” he says. “We had got to the point where we assumed Bryan had been butchered so badly that she’d never be able to fly.”

Amid all the furious reviews and posts, Lee realised he and James were far from the only unhappy customers — and their numbers were growing. One private Facebook group, titled ‘Scammed by Birds4U’, has 400 members and is a repository for complaints, advice, and venting about the shop. 

The main allegations are that the store sells older birds passed off as young ones, birds marketed as ‘hand-reared’ turn out to be feral and terrified of humans and, most seriously, that birds from the shop have been sick with the highly contagious — and usually fatal — Psittacine Bird and Feather Disease (PBFD). 

None of these claims seem to phase Birds4U. “Haters are everywhere” replied the shop’s Google account to a scathing one-star review. But campaigners are determined to break out of their little niche corner of the internet and see a reckoning for the birds of Birmingham.

Hi, Madeleine here. Thanks for reading my first story for The Dispatch. We send out several editions a week covering a wide-range of topics from politics to culture and mind-boggling investigations. And they're all about Birmingham and the West Midlands. Why not sign up to our mailing list? It's completely free.

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Birds not 4 u

Behind Birds4U is Atif Masood, a local business owner and media personality, who broadcasts with West Midlands radio station, Radio XL and also posts a high volume of video content to platforms like TikTok. In these clips, Masood seems mild-mannered, earnestly reciting religious fables into the camera in Urdu, a large pair of square-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. 

After multiple attempts to reach Masood, he finally got back to us regarding the claims, telling The Dispatch: “our business sells thousands of birds each year. With a customer base of that size, individual experiences will naturally vary depending on handling expectations, and post-sale care”. 

Birds4U does get a lot of business. There aren’t a lot of bricks-and-mortar exotic bird shops in the country, according to Lee, and Birds4U are selling — supposedly — younger animals, which are in high demand. So disgruntled customers stretch the breadth of the UK.

The satellite community around the shop began three years ago, when Natalie, a 45-year-old office manager, returned to her Llandudno home with an Indian Ringneck parrot that was advertised as “young and hand tamed”. 

As soon as she took it out of the travel box, however, “it was screaming and screeching”. Natalie realised her new pet was “feral” and “a lot older than [she] thought.” Although an “intelligent” bird, Natalie describes it as “completely terrified” and “vicious.” 

She started the Facebook group after her experience, hoping to warn others. She’s “constantly surprised” at how many members the group has now. Atif Masood is less impressed. “Large social media groups often contain a mix of opinions, including individuals with no direct experience of the business,” he tells The Dispatch. “Membership numbers do not equate to verified evidence.”

Birds4U’s Facebook says they have been operating since 2008. Atif Masood registered the company under UK Birds Limited, and was listed as its director, in January 2019. Interestingly, the first negative reviews began a year later, in 2020.

'Instant red flag'

It’s not just customers trying to raise the alarm. Jaiden-James Elijah Spragg or ‘JJ’ is a 20 year-old bird enthusiast living in Walsall. In late 2024, he applied for a store colleague vacancy at Birds4U, advertised online. He was excited when the call came that he’d got the gig, and started in December. 

Just three days later, JJ quit via text. Today, he describes the experience as “horror story worthy.”