There had been few leads in the case of the vanishing parrot of Margate. By now its owner, and Kent Police’s finest, may well have despaired of ever finding the abducted bird.

Sue Parsons claims that her parrot has reappeared in a nearby pub, provoking controversy in the King Edward VII, and outrage from its landlady, who insists that the bird is her rightful property. Ms Parsons is demanding a DNA test in the hope of settling the argument once and for all.

Until the day that she walked into the King Edward VII pub on the edge of Margate, Ms Parsons feared that she would never see Pickle again.

Pickle the parrot, an African Grey valued at more than £700, was abducted when Ms Parsons left her for a moment on the doorstep in January after a trip to the pet shop. For months after this parrot-napping, there was no clue of Pickle’s whereabouts. Then came some intelligence.

A friend thought that she had seen it in the King Edward VII, a large pub on the edge of a neighbouring council estate. Ms Parsons carried out her own investigations. She ventured into the pub twice and approached the cage, on a table in the corner of a bar. The first time, she said: “I went to see it and caressed the bird in the way I used to caress my own - and she responded lovingly.” She returned a few days later. Again, she said, “the bird responded to me”.

“I kissed her beak and she sucked my finger. I caressed her lots of times. I made one noise to her that I used to make and she repeated it immediately.

“Its face appears to be the same to me but most of all it is the relationship that I have with the bird.”

Ms Parsons, a law lecturer at Thanet College, had kept budgies before she bought her parrot in 2006 from a shop in Margate. The bird they named Pickle quickly captured the affections of her three young children.

All were desperately sad at the bird’s sudden disappearance this year. “I haven’t even been able to clean her cage out,” she said. “I’ve left it exactly as it was. I was just devastated, we have all missed her so much. We desperately want to get her back in her rightful place, back in her cage.”

She believes that the downed feathers in Pickle’s cage could provide DNA samples for the police to match against the pub’s new parrot.

Police have interviewed Ms Parsons and have also visited the King Edward VII to question staff.

Behind the bar, Victoria Thompson, the landlady, dismisses Ms Parsons’s claims as a case of mistaken identity. “It’s my bird and that’s the end of it,” she said.

She has told police that she bought the bird in good faith from an uncle who had bought it two months earlier from two unidentified men.

She has refused to hand over the parrot for a test and yesterday it appeared to have been moved out of the public area of the bar.

Ms Parsons was said to be “spitting feathers”.

A Kent Police spokesman said: “We continue to investigate and allegation of theft.”

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