The cages that house the rainbow beaked toucans and sinister-looking ravens and spunky-haired cockatiels at 33rd & Bird are now bolted shut with padlocks and fastened tight with carabiners. The owner of the exotic-bird and supply store, Pierre Brooks, can’t afford to take any more risks.

Not with holiday-time grifters lurking about for hand-fed baby birds and the city’s underground market for winged exotics seemingly in bloom.

“‘Tis the season to shop, ’tis the season to steal,” Mr. Brooks said yesterday. “Beware.”

He knows firsthand.

On November 15, a scruffy-looking man wearing a backpack entered his crowded store between Madison and Park avenues in broad daylight, stuffed two green Amazons into a knapsack, and escaped, police said. Both parrots were babies of about 11 weeks old, valued at $3,200.

Then it happened again. Five days after the green Amazons were shuttled off from their steel-wire cages, a team of thieves with a baby stroller, a fancy shawl, and a black leather purse pulled off a more complicated heist, according to police. Together, they worked to snatch a 2-month-old African grey parrot from its cage shortly before noon on a Saturday morning, during the store’s busiest hours. The African grey parrot, a shy, docile-looking bird with a squat red tail, is valued at $1,500. It is considered the world’s most intelligent parrot, for its ability to mimic words and maintain a vast vocabulary.

“So unscrupulous,” Mr. Brooks, a mild-mannered man who used to work as a real-estate property manager, said of the recent robberies.

“The gall,” he said.

“In a city where we have such cinderblock and steel surrounding us, the banks and the big buildings, these people,” he said of he robbers, “must have thought everyone else would be too busy with other things in life than to notice a missing bird. … But what they didn’t count on is the tenacity we have taken to recover these birds and charge those responsible.”

The bird bandits also may not have counted on Mr. Brooks’s newly in stalled surveillance system. Over the past few days, the presence of four small cameras monitoring the store has led to the arrest of one alleged bird thief, German Espinal, 27, of Upper Manhattan, and the return of the African grey. The videotapes show both crimes frame by frame.

All the thieves appeared to have devised different acting roles to preoccupy the store’s staff, Mr. Brooks said.

According to the in-house footage, the man alleged to be Mr. Espinal entered the bird store accompanied by an older-looking woman, whom Mr. Brooks calls the “grandmother” and who pushed the baby carriage throughout the store with a small child inside. A younger-looking woman, seemingly dressed to attract attention yet disguised to conceal her identity, also accompanied the team. She had long blond hair and wore dark black sunglasses. Underneath an oversized shawl marked with black and white zebra stripes she also carried a large black leather purse, which she later used to hide the bird as she transported the grey out of the store.

The man identified as Mr. Espinal, dressed in a white T-shirt and black leather jacket, had been spotted in the store weeks before, trying to remove a cockatoo, Mr. Brooks said, and was asked to leave.

On the videotape, the man who is thought to be Mr. Espinal can be seen reaching both hands into the African grey’s cage. He then pulled the bird from the steel wire cage and quickly stuffed it into the purse of the younger looking woman. All lingered around the store for a few minutes, pretending to be shoppers simply browsing, and then left.

“This is beyond random theft,” Mr. Brooks said, suggesting the robberies of the baby birds, which are hand-fed and are therefore more domesticated, were related and represented an increase in demand for exotic birds on the underground market.

Saturday morning, after receiving a confidential tip, police arrested Mr. Espinal at his home in Inwood. He was charged with grand larceny, a felony.

Hours later, and looking to have the criminal charges against Mr. Espinal dropped, an older man who identified himself as a relative of Mr. Espinal came to the bird store and apologized for the crime, Mr. Brooks said. The reason for stealing the Amazon grey was not for sale on the black market, Mr. Brooks said the relative explained, but that the “grandmother” seen in the video footage had lost a similar type of a bird in a fire and was looking to replace it. “So why didn’t they just buy it?” Mr. Brooks said.

Mr. Espinal and members of his family could not be reached yesterday.

While the pair of baby green Amazons is still missing, the African grey has been returned to the store and is chirping in its cage. The bird had recently been purchased, Mr. Brooks said, and the response from its owners upon hearing that the bird had been returned seemed to eclipse the robberies, if only for a moment. “It made me feel like Santa Claus,” Mr. Brooks said.