The bird man is at his desk, vaping and working the phone. Fly traps coated with insects dangle from the ceiling. Tigers and lions pace fenced enclosures in the backyard. Tilting in his swivel chair - legs crossed, plaid short-sleeve shirt unbuttoned to the chest, reading glasses propped on his balding head - Gideon Fourie takes a long drag on his blue vape and begins to tell me how he became one of South Africa's leading parrot traders. "The African grey is the best talking and friendly [sic] bird in the world," Fourie says, rolling the R's in his heavily Afrikaans-­inflected English. He swats a tabby cat off the brown leather sofa where I'm sitting in his home office in Nigel, a small gold-mining town about 40 miles southeast of Johannesburg. On this sweaty February day in the Southern Hemisphere, he's speaking above the whir of an oscillating floor fan and the drone of Fox News. He smiles: "Yes, that's the popular one." Fourie's involvement in the animal trade has deep roots. As a boy living in Rustenburg, he helped out on his parents' ostrich farm and tannery, which turned skins from springbok antelope and other animals into rugs, hats, purses, wallets, and throw pillows. Later, after working for the family business selling ostriches to the U.S. and Taiwan, he joined the South African Air Force, where he became a certified metalworking instructor before getting into politics as a town counselor in Boksburg.