About us
The Perch Search is a UK marketplace where hobbyists and licensed breeders sell birds to keepers who actually want to keep them. It is run by people who keep birds themselves, and it is meant to be used by everyone — not just the well connected.
Why we started it
The person behind The Perch Search has kept birds for over five years — all kinds, with a soft spot for chickens, ducks, budgies and finches. Over that time the same problem kept coming up: finding a bird you could trust meant either paying a lot to go through the right circles, or taking a chance on a stranger. Selling a bird was just as awkward, especially for a hobbyist with a small aviary and nothing to promote themselves with.
So we built somewhere that makes buying and selling birds easier, cheaper and open to everyone. Birdkeeping should not be a club. And because there are too many scammers out there, the part that mattered most was making it safe and fair for all — for the buyer, for the seller, and for the bird.
What we are building
We want The Perch Search to be the UK’s no.1 platform to buy and sell any kind of bird — budgies and finches, chickens and ducks, birds from a back-garden aviary or from a licensed breeder — on one simple condition: the paperwork is correct and the sale is legal. If that holds, we want the sale to happen here rather than in a comment section or a paid advert somewhere it cannot be checked.
That means honest descriptions, real people behind the listings, and prices that do not include the cost of fancy marketing. It also means saying no: to sellers who cannot evidence their birds, to paperwork that does not add up, and to anything that would not stand up if it were checked.
How trust works here
ID Verified sellers
A seller only carries the green ID Verified badge once their identification document has been uploaded and held against their account. We check that the document exists and belongs to the person listing, so the name on a listing is tied to a real, traceable person.
Search before you commit
Every bird can be filtered by species, age, seller type, DNA sexing and price, and by how far you are willing to travel. You can see who is selling and what they have sold before you message anyone.
Questions go to the seller
Enquiries are sent through the site from a confirmed account, so a seller knows they are talking to a real person, and the conversation stays on the record instead of disappearing into a private chat.
Clear what we will not do
We do not hide a seller’s identity behind an anonymous account, we do not let anyone pay for a badge, and we take down listings that mislead about age, sex, health, origin or paperwork.
The Trust Box on every bird’s page shows that seller’s history, ratings and reviews — the same information we would want if we were the buyer. Where a bird has been DNA sexed, that is stated on the listing rather than left as a guess.
What it costs
Sellers pay £9.99 a month to list, plus £1 for each advert, so a hobbyist with two or three birds a year is not priced out. Buyers who want to be told the moment a bird goes up can join for £4.99 a month and get alerts by email. Nothing is hidden in a commission, and we do not take a cut of what a bird sells for.
Getting in touch
The quickest way to reach us about a bird is the “Ask about this Perch” button on that bird’s page — it goes straight to the person who hatched, reared or is homing it. For anything else, our customer-service email address is still being set up; until it is published you can write to PARRAGON LTD, company number 17222079, at 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX. Press and media enquiries are handled by email — see our Press & media policy.
We are a young site and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If something here is not working, tell us and we will fix it.