It's odd that you don't see them now, there is a reason for this as I'll explain.
In 1903 there was a high profile Jewel Robbery. The police had 4 men they suspected of doing the crime, but they couldn't prove it. There problem was evidence, they heard from people (informants) that they were the men that did it but pinning them to the crime was impossible.
The police looked wide in their search for help seeking many crackpots with slim chances of success, all of these approaches were kept from the press for fear of ridicule.
By chance their break came from an animal trainer who had heard about the case. He specialised in teaching parrots to listen to people talking and repeat what they said. He demonstrated this on several occasions to the detectives on the case and seeing the reliability of the what the parrot could repeat they formed a plan to catch the evidence they needed.
The gang members all frequented a local hostelry into which was introduced one of the specially trained parrots. Over the course of several months the detectives got lots of transcripts out of the parrot, but frustratingly it mainly consisted of jokes, orders and arguments. They were about to give up hope when the parrot re-called yet another argument that led into a fight.
The gang members had started arguing about shares (they hand sensibly sat on the haul) what was particularly useful was that they kept mentioning each others names and arguing who was responsible for what part of the job and how that should relate to the number of shares. This was all the evidence they needed and led to conviction of two of the gang members.
When asked where the evidence had come from the police just said it had come from a conversation that an under cover officer had heard, neglecting to mention that the officer in question was actually a parrot!
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