Haven in the asphalt savanna

IT is a hard heart that doesn’t break a little in the presence of a bird in a cage or -- in the case of the parrots of California -- cheer at an escape. One Los Angeles species to elude the pet trade has so thoroughly transcended entrapment that it is fast becoming an urban natural wonder.

Every afternoon at an intersection on the border of the foothill towns of Arcadia and Temple City, an hour before dusk, successive flocks of four, six, 10, as many as 30 red-crowned parrots appear from the west. They are returning to their roosts after a long day’s foraging across the San Gabriel Valley. They settle in the boughs of the old sweet gum trees and cypresses and call for mates, their young, their friends. At first there are a dozen, then 60, then 100, and by sunset, there are too many to count. Every tree on the block, and for several blocks, is filled.

They feed, they call, they duet, they scold, they play. If there’s a nut, they’ll give it a crack with powerful mandibles. They preen, pausing for a good scratch with those amazing zygodactylous feet. An arrangement for two toes front, two back allows parrots the kind of acrobatics that could crack a smile from Stalin. They swing upside down and, on a lark, might pluck a twig and poke with it.

Clowns, yes, but beautiful ones. Their heads are a flashing lipstick-red. Most of the rest of the plumage is a brilliant green that accounts for their taxonomic classification, Amazona viridigenalis, or Green Amazon.

Given the spectacle, one would expect a wild setting, but the surroundings could not be more prosaic: the border between two farm towns long since swallowed by a network of bungalows and ranch houses. Chuck Yaras’ home is under one of the largest roosts. When he returns from a day at work at a local Trader Joe’s, there might be 100 birds overhead. “It’s like the Amazon,” he says.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County gives the red-crowned parrot’s natural habitat as “arid tropical lowlands, dry open pine-oak ridges, and in tropical deciduous forests.” In other words, says evolutionary biologist Karen Mabb, “they like savanna.” Mabb, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, says that the asphalt savannas of Southern California interspersed with enough interesting fruit and nut trees are serving red-crowned parrots just fine.

Traditionally, urban ecology was simply too man-made for the taste of naturalists. People who studied parrots wanted plane tickets to Costa Rica. Wild was only wild in the tropics. However, 12 years ago, Mabb, who then lived in Temple City, began systematically studying the birds. Soon she met Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Natural History Museum, who independently had started the census that became the California Parrot Project. Thirty-three species of parrot were reported to his study, including the most striking cockatoos and macaws ever to adorn a Technicolor pirate movie. Most of these, he thinks, were tame and never became part of a breeding population. (The lucky ones found their way back to owners, the unlucky ones perished.)

The successful breeding populations, he says, were never tame, but arose from lost shipments of wild birds that escaped when it was still legal to import them between the 1950s and late ‘80s. These include the black-hooded parakeets of Brentwood, the yellow-chevroned parakeets of Lafayette Park, the rose-ringed parakeets of Malibu, the mitred parakeets of Palos Verdes and blue-crowned parakeets of Northridge, 10 species in all.

The naturalized populations vary, from 60 to 600, but none of them approach the 1,000-plus status of the red-crowned Parrots of Temple City. In addition to those, there are at least 500 or 600 other red-crowned parrots in Orange, more in Fullerton and other colonies around the state, says Walter Piper, an ornithologist at Chapman University in Orange. The upshot: We may have as many red-crowned parrots here as in their native range in northeastern Mexico.

Unfortunately, that’s not just because we have a lot but because the native population of red-crowns is collapsing so precipitously that it’s considered endangered. “The problem is that poachers cut trees down to get the nestlings, so they not only take the birds but they destroy the habitat,” Garrett says.

“There may be as few as 3,000 left in the wild there,” Mabb says. “That’s it.”

The same threats hang over many other species of parrot taken by the millions from the wild in the last 50 years. But not everyone is sympathetic.

“The poachers can come up and take these anytime they want,” says Bud Becker, a retired cabinetmaker, whose Temple City home is a block from Yaras’ and whose sweet gum tree is popular with the parrots. He’s in his garage with the door open. “The Snow Maiden: Dance of the Tumblers” plays on K-Mozart (105.1). “They make a mess and they’re noisy. I’ve been on the porch with guests and had to come inside because you couldn’t hear.”

Most parrots are monogamous and strong believers in family hour before bedtime. When they return from foraging, they perch in street trees, calling for family and friends as they appear to be sorting themselves into clans. This is, indeed, noisy. Press Garrett and Mabb as to what the parrots are saying, and they will say, “The vocalizations are complex.” There are begging calls from young, predator alerts, mating calls and hailing calls.

Last but not least, there is the ability to mimic. It’s easy to enjoy a bird that can ask for a cracker without questioning why it might have developed the skill other than to be amusing in captivity. However, graduate students of Jack Bradbury, a professor at Cornell University, have conducted studies in the Caribbean, Amazonia and Australia, scrutinizing how parrots talk to other parrots. They discovered voices as distinctive as Lauren Bacall and Bernadette Peters in the same species along with clear regional dialects. In an orange-fronted parakeet, they detected what may explain the tendency to mimicry.

“We think what they may be doing is changing their call a bit to let another bird know that they are directing the attention to them,” says Bradbury.

To explain what he means, he uses our two names. “It would be as if after I called, ‘I’m Jack,’ and you called, ‘I’m Emily’ a number of times, I changed it to say, ‘I’m Jack-ily.’ We think what they may be doing is changing their call a bit to let the other bird know that they are talking to them. ‘I’m Jack but I’m talking to you, Emily.’ ”

Luckily for Bud Becker, the parrots periodically change their roosts, and luckily for the parrots, not everyone dislikes them as much as he does. “They’re a little noisy,” says Robert Hoccom, a resident out for a dusk walk at Daines Drive and Baldwin Avenue. He shrugs. “You get it a couple of days or a week, then they move. They’re all over Arcadia and Temple City.”

Even at the heart of the cacophony, it passes quickly. In little more than an hour, the parrots arrive at their roosts, call one another, divide up into clans, then slip into the sheltering branches of Canary Island pines, where they fall silent for a long night’s sleep.

At dawn, after a short wake-up, they are off. “Parrots are like us,” explains Garrett. “They commute.” The reason most of us only see them by day, and then only for a week or so, is that parrots travel across the city by different routes all year foraging for food. They know what’s in fruit where before the keenest-eyed gardeners.

Their diets vary by species, with red-crowned parrots and mitred parakeets showing the most adaptability. Yellow-chevroned parakeets are so partial to the seedpods of silk floss trees that their population growth can be tracked where developers have used that ornamental tree. Presently, the silk floss trees outside the Natural History Museum are full of them.

As Garrett and Mabb continue trying to map the birds’ population growth, the parrots are following human development. Like our earthworms, spiders, almost all of our garden plants, they -- like us -- are not adapted for survival in the wild west. They would die in short order without the shelter and food of our urban canopy.

Since 1992, importation of endangered wild birds has become illegal and most parrots sold in stores are bred in captivity. Garrett hopes that well-managed aviculture might forestall destruction of more natural habitats. Yet where there are people who pay for parrots, there are people who smuggle them.

Why we capture parrots is unclear -- just that it happens wherever these birds occur. The parrot trade has left naturalized populations not just in temperate states of California and Florida, but in Connecticut and Illinois, and across northern Europe. Perhaps it is their ability to mimic, or their comical acrobatics, or that they come in palettes of paradise. They’re like remnants of a world that must have been so drenched in beauty that these brilliant creatures were just the birds in the trees. What the parrots of Temple City tell us is that in pursuing that beauty, we are destroying that old world, while unexpectedly creating a new one.

Emily Green can be reached at emily.green@latimes.com.

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Flock to these sites

Look, listen and read. To find out more about parrots and even hear them, try these sources of information:

The California Parrot Project, at www.parrotproject.org.

Cornell University has the largest library of bird sounds in the world including a CD “The Voices of New World Parrots” available at www.birds.cornell.edu/shop/agNWParrots.html.