Birds of Paradise
Parrots are immigrants, and as one season yields to the next, they take flight, seeking out the newly ripened fruit and a secure place to sleep. Sometimes they are welcomed, other times scorned.
Debbie House knows their names. She has watched them struggle to find their niche in an alien environment. House, a graduate student in biological sciences at Cal Poly Pomona, studies urban bird communities. She has observed at least seven types of parrots in one Orange County neighborhood.
House did not set out to study parrots. When she began the field observations for her master’s thesis, she wanted to know how birds are affected by the plant life and change of seasons in different urban environments.
She chose neighborhoods in four communities: Rancho Santa Margarita, Irvine, Fullerton and Santa Ana.
Early in the morning, before most residents had reached for their first cup of coffee, House was already at one of her observation sites, scanning the trees and sky with her binoculars. For two years she kept notes on the birds, counting the year-round residents and summer visitors and noting their favorite foraging spots and romantic habits.
With permission from residents, she measured the height and density of the shrubs and trees in their yards, the birds’ habitat. Not surprisingly, all this activity drew out curious neighbors.
“People [in Santa Ana] were really interested in the parrots. . . . They thought I was studying them,” House said.
Although she did spot a parrot or two elsewhere, the big, green birds announced their presence most loudly--and often--in that city, the oldest area in the study.
With houses dating back as far as the turn of the century, Floral Park in northern Santa Ana has an abundance of mature fruit and nut trees, the parrots’ normal diet. (They also thrive on sycamore and eucalyptus leaves and magnolia flowers.)
The birds can be found there year-round, but they are especially active in the late summer and fall.
The second year of House’s study, one resident reported seeing a flock of 200 to 300 birds.
In their natural habitats in Central and South America and India, parrots “fly long distances in search of food,” she said. “They seem to do that in the urban areas here also. I don’t know how far these birds are moving.”
As House became more familiar with the parrots, her species count began to climb. By the time she completed her two years of field work in June 1997, she had spotted seven species, and she felt certain there were others she had been unable to identify.
The most common were the yellow-headed Amazon (Amazona oratrix) and the red-crowned parrot (Amazona viridigenalis).
The wild cries and distinctive silhouettes of the parrots in flight seem strangely compatible with the graceful trees and homes in northern Santa Ana.
Aside from occasional grumbling about their noisy sunrise socializing, residents more often use words such as “charming” and “romantic” when referring to the birds.
“Most people I know love them,” said Sandy DeAngelis, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1984.
The Green Parrot Cafe, on nearby Main Street, was named in honor of the birds by owners and longtime residents Ed Kredel, Ann and John Coil, and Gene and Anne Andres.
How did the parrots come to roost in Southern California?
Free-flying parrots have been reported here as far back as the late 1940s, House said.
Stories of big escapes abound. A smuggler in Alhambra, afraid of being caught, released 200 birds in the early 1950s. An unknown number of birds were released when a fire destroyed a bird farm in Pasadena in 1959.
Some of these stories have been repeated so often they have taken on the aura of urban mythology, ornithologist Kimball Garrett wrote in an article for Western Birds. Garrett is the ornithology collections manager with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He has studied Southern California’s parrots for years, with help from local Audubon members and others in the bird-watching community.
Garrett doubts that the flocks of birds wandering through the Southland are former pets, because most captive-bred birds do not survive in the wild.
“I suspect that most of our populations were established when large batches of birds were brought in and somehow released--accidentally or perhaps on purpose,” by smugglers, he said.
Although the parrots were present in small numbers for many years, Garrett believes they increased during the ‘70s and ‘80s. As the human population boomed, the importation of parrots, legal and illegal, grew. Legal importation has been curtailed by new laws, he said, but some smuggling continues.
Only one parrot species was ever native to the United States--the Carolina parakeet of the Southeast, which has been extinct since the early part of this century. The nonnative parrots have survived, Garrett said, because people have transformed the landscape of Southern California to look a lot like the birds’ natural habitats, even down to some of the same fruit trees.
They also transplanted the parrots.
This situation is not unique, according to John Bianchi, a spokesman for the National Audubon Society. “There are several well-documented feral parrot populations across the United States,” Bianchi said. “The most well-known and certainly the longest-lived populations have occurred due to an accidental release at Kennedy Airport in the early 1970s.”
The birds, monk parakeets from Argentina, have established colonies in areas including New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. Although their numbers are relatively small--hundreds versus an estimated 3 1/2 billion birds that migrate into the U.S. every year--Bianchi emphasized that the presence of nonnative animals must be taken seriously.
Experts worry that nonnative species such as the parrots could crowd out native birds (so far, this has not happened). Many animals have become endangered or extinct under such circumstances.
“Human history is full of examples of people thinking they’re doing the right thing in regard to animal life, moving them into the exact wrong situation and creating a disaster,” Bianchi said.
So far, aside from squabbling with the crows and damaging some palm trees where they were nesting in the city of Orange, local parrots have had little impact on their surroundings.
They are not migratory, said the Natural History Museum’s Garrett, and they have stayed within urban and suburban areas, along with other species that are able to survive there, such as jays, crows and mockingbirds.
There is even the possibility, according to Garrett, that some parrot species that have survived here could be reintroduced to native habitats where they are threatened.
Certainly, the scientists say, they are worth more study.
“They’re part of the ecosystem now. They’re part of the local fauna,” House said.
