Brooklyn Community Gardeners

Brooklyn's Parrot Colonies

DISPATCH FROM A BIRD-FRIENDLY BOROUGH

Brooklyn's Parrot Colonies
Posted by: "Mitchel Cohen" mitchelcohen@mindspring.com mitchelcohen2001
Wed Jan 17, 2007 12:40 pm (PST)


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701474.html

DISPATCH FROM A BIRD-FRIENDLY BOROUGH
Parrots Have Colonized the Wilds of Brooklyn

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2006; Page A02

NEW YORK -- Alex Joseph, a West Indian-born parks worker, rakes the
lawn at the grandly gothic Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn when he and his
fellow laborers hear what sounds like a flock of sea gulls
dive-bombing at their heads. The workers instinctively duck and whip
round and look up
and see -- those crazy green parrots, expertly mimicking the sea gull's caw.

"Man, they do that a couple times a week just to play with our
minds," Joseph said, grinning wide and shaking his head. "They are a
crazy bunch of
immigrants, those birds."

They are the wild parrots of Brooklyn, these emerald-feathered
yakkers with the wisenheimer sense of humor. Thought to be long-ago
escapees from a
container at John F. Kennedy International Airport, their ranks
replenished by unauthorized releases from pet shops, the parakeets --
originally from Argentina -- have become accomplished city dwellers.
There is a parrot colony along the Hudson River cliffs in New Jersey
and another bunch that
prefers Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Of late, two arrivistes have
taken up residency on an apartment ledge on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But mostly these are Brooklyn parrots, content in their adopted
borough of 2.5 million people.

"They are successful Brooklynites, in that they are adaptable, eat a
wide variety of foods and like to talk," says Eleanor Miele, a
professor at Brooklyn College who lives in the Park Slope
neighborhood and has found herself entranced by the parrots.

New York has many wild critters, and a few are not human. A coyote
wandered into Central Park before running afoul of sunbathers, and the hawks
Pale Male and Lola established aeries on a gilded stretch of Fifth
Avenue. Raccoons know their way around Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and
muskrats poke at the mud flats of the Harlem River.

But the parrots -- which are about a foot long and are known as monk
parakeets because their gray chests and tufts resemble a monk's skullcap and
frock -- are among the city's more cacophonous and unexpected residents.

Their cry sounds like metal scraping metal. (San Francisco has
parrots-in-residence on Telegraph Hill. And Chicago has a broad- shouldered,
loud-squawking crew that has been called "Hells Angels with wings.")

Most Brooklyn parrots live in colonies of 50 or 60 birds, although a
few less sociable types live on Coney Island or in Canarsie or Gravesend. They
favor homes atop light and transmission poles; at Green-Wood Cemetery
they inhabit the soaring gothic spires near the gate. Their nests are vast
400-pound constructs, with foyers and anterooms and a space where the
females lay eggs and enjoy a respite from the males.

Con Edison knows these nests well, as periodically the power
company's workers clamber around them. "These aren't nests; they're
condominiums," a spokesman said.

Half a dozen nests can be seen atop the light poles at the Brooklyn
College athletic field. On a recent Saturday, 20 or 30 of the
resident parrots swooped down and, amid much screeching, alighted on
the branches of an oak tree beside a pre-World War II apartment
building. Children inside the apartments gestured and called at the
birds; sometimes the parrots talk back. (In captivity, monk parakeets
can develop a vocabulary of about 200 words.)

Steve Baldwin, 50, lives in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and acts as the
parrots' pro bono publicist and bard. He has composed a Lou
Reed-style song, "The
Ballad of the Brooklyn Parrots" (available at BrooklynParrots.com),
which mixes human and parrot voices and which one "critic" called "Jim Morrison
meets Rick Moranis at the Audubon Society."

"They eat berries, ornamental plants and sometimes pizza," Baldwin
said as he gave a tour of the Brooklyn College nests to a dozen
birders. "They are
very intelligent, and of course they don't like the suburbs."

How the parrots came to Brooklyn is a mystery. Apparently a large
crate filled with the parrots broke open at Kennedy International
Airport in the late 1960s. Baldwin's voluminous research tends to
implicate mafia goodfellas in the deed, although that "fact" might be
too delicious to check out. The parrots hung around the Jamaica Bay
marshes that girdle JFK's southern edges before moving into Brooklyn.
The cold was no problem, as the
parrots hailed from temperate-to-chilly Argentina.

At first, state and federal wildlife-control officers tried to wipe
out this "invasive species." Hundreds of parrots perished, and in the
1970s, the last large colony relocated to light towers at the Rikers
Island jail. An eradication team showed up to finish the job -- but
the parrots had disappeared.

"Someone tipped the parrots off," Baldwin says with a shrug. "They
circled back to Brooklyn, and everyone left them alone."

Now there is a new threat. Poachers with nets are snatching the
parrots and selling them to pet stores. The poachers have all but
denuded several
neighborhoods. It has parrot-loving denizens of Brooklyn talking
about vigilante patrols.

Kay Martin lives somewhere near Coney Island, in a house filled with
at least nine varieties of parrots. She acknowledges that their
racket awakens her at night. So what? They are friends, and they talk
to her. Martin, diminutive and pugnacious, spends most of her spare
time safeguarding the wild parrots.

Are there nests near your home? She frowns.

"I'm not saying," she says. "The last thing our parrots need is
another reporter poking around."

(c) 2007 Washington Post

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Washington Post article