It is just medieval supply chain details. At one level the origin of the cockatoo might not have been important then to those entertained by such things, at ano

It is just medieval supply chain details. At one level the origin of the cockatoo might not have been important then to those entertained by such things, at another level the true origin of the cockatoo might also have been a closely guarded secret. If you buy a fancy new car then the guy in the showroom has no idea who the supplier of the seats was, never mind who supplied the leather to the seat supplier or whom the farmer was that brought the cows to market for the supplier of the supplier to buy. This applies even if it is a Rolls Royce type of car where the marketing material says the leather comes from cows grown in Norway where there is no barbed wire. None of this information is secret but you are not going to find out the name of the farm the cows were 'grown' on. With illegal substances - drugs - there is a matter of secrecy, the guy down the pub who can sell your intoxicant of choice is not going to tell you who he buys from and you wouldn't ask that question anyway. Then there is the rest of the chain to the port of entry and it gets to be a big mystery after there. Yet somewhere in the Bekaa valley or in darkest Afghanistan there is someone making the stuff that ends up a continent away. At each step of this black market supply chain things are far from transparent. Spices and silk were like this for a long time, nobody knew where the guys in Venice got their silk from, they didn't even know yet they controlled that market until the Turks worked it out. Cockatoos were probably just another of those type of novelty items.