Wild Parrots in Cities Are A Delightful Development
In the Anthropocene, urban green spaces are increasingly safe havens for flocks of these colorful, intelligent birds. Awesome!
London. Paris. Hong Kong. Singapore. Chicago. New York City. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Sydney. Rome. Athens. Phoenix. Dallas. Brussels. Houston. New Orleans. Barcelona.
What do these cities have in common? In the Anthropocene, they’ve all become home to at least one species of wild-living parrots, generally the descendants of escaped or abandoned pet birds. Social, colorful, melodious, and intelligent, the arrival of parrots in modern civilization’s great cities is a delight—and may well end up saving a few species! Let’s explore this phenomenon.
London, Paris, Rome, Miami, Tokyo…
The Anthropocene city parrot par excellence is surely the rose-ringed parakeet (Psittacula krameri), a wide-ranging generalist native to India and Africa, but introduced everywhere from Japan to the UK to the USA. In Tokyo, spreading flocks of rose-ringed parakeets hang out near the Tokyo Institute of Technology. They’re particularly common across Northern Europe, where this writer has seen their cacophonous flocks enlivening several different cities’ parks1 (including on my recent trip to Amsterdam). In Paris, they split the air with their cries from the leafy Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of the city to the half-restored Notre Dame Cathedral near the center. In London, they swoop through St. James’ Park. In Rome, they soar over Vatican City and perch on the Colosseum.
Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union, is estimated to be home to around 10,000 rose-ringed parakeets as of 2023, possibly the descendants of a few dozen released from a small zoo in the 1970s. Researchers note that rose-ringed parakeets benefit from both warming temperatures caused by global warming and abundant food in restaurant, market, and park-filled urban neighborhoods.
New York, Chicago, Houston, Austin, New Orleans….
Monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus), originally from South America, now are well established across the USA, particularly known for breeding across the greater New York City and Chicago metro areas. In fact, they’re now found in a whopping 43 U.S. states! They survive Chicago’s harsh winters by switching “almost exclusively” to backyard bird feeders as a food source from December through February. Monk parakeets were reportedly some of the first animals to return to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and are now widespread in the Big Easy. They’re common across Texas, with colonies in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. They’re also increasingly common in European cities as well, sharing space with the rose-ringed parakeet from Rome to Brussels to Barcelona.
And wherever they go, they start winning over some friends and admirers. At least one person is leading parrot safaris in Brooklyn. The Economist notes that monk parakeets building their elaborate stick nests around warm electrical equipment has caused more than a few power outages in Long Island in recent years, but that they remain popular with residents nonetheless, and that local utility company PSEG has stuck to a policy of not destroying nests during nesting season. Former Chicago mayor Harold Washington called them a “good luck talisman,” and Chicago residents once threatened a lawsuit to successfully block the USDA’s proposed removal of the local monk parakeets. This underscores a key reason for the success of parrots in Anthropocene cities-they’re cute. They’re fun, colorful, and people like having them around.
And there’s a certain poignant historical resonance to the arrival and flourishing of a small green big-nest-building parakeet in eastern North America. For we once had a native species answering this description: the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), which ranged from the Atlantic to the Great Plains before mass deforestation and unregulated hunting contributed to its extinction in the 20th century. The last known specimen, or “endling,” named Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. The monk parakeets are now living in much of their old habitat, possibly occupying some of the same niche and potentially playing a similar role in local ecosystems.
America drove the Carolina parakeet to extinction, but we’re now providing a welcoming home for their distant cousins. To this writer, that’s worth celebrating!
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