The concrete jungle

To the singular sounds of San Francisco -- cable cars, foghorns, gridlocked drivers waxing poetic -- add the siren scream of a flock of wild parrots. Inhabitants of Telegraph Hill for at least a decade, the flock of cherry-headed conures flew under the radar until Mark Bittner, a resident of the Greenwich Steps on Telegraph Hill, became fascinated with them. He fed them, named them, studied them and, when some became ill, took them into his home and cared for them. Bittner wrote a book about his experience with Pushkin, Filbert, Scrapper and the rest of the clan in “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.” “When I first started watching them, there were only 26 parrots, and I was able to recognize and name every bird,” he writes in his online Parrot Pages. “Today there are around 160, and I recognize only a handful.” A documentary with the same title that chronicles Bittner’s interactions with the flock opens March 4 in Los Angeles. “The response to the film has been amazing,” says filmmaker Judy Irving. A man who works in the office towers of the Embarcadero Center, near the parrots’ nighttime nesting ground, wrote that the film opened his eyes to the astonishing variety of wildlife that inhabits every city. Bird-watchers from as far away as New York, Wisconsin and Chicago have written to Irving and Bittner to describe their local wild parrot flocks. (Wild parrots thrive in many parts of Southern California.) “I love that when people come out of the theater, instead of looking down at the concrete when they walk home, they look up into the sky,” Irving says. The film opens at the Nuart Theatre on March 4, with Irving and Bittner in attendance for a Q&A; after the show. For information about the film, go to www.wildparrotsfilm.com; for bios of the birds and other parrot talk, visit www.pelicanmedia.org/wildparrots.html.

-- Veronique de Turenne