We’ll Always Have Parrots!

The United States was once a haven to many native parrot species, but we managed to kill them all off within two centuries, except for two species. The thick-billed parrot (aka the thick-billed macaw, or conure) and the green parakeet are the only living members of the wild parrot family still extant in the US. So, the uptick of expanding feral parrot flocks thriving in LA and San Diego is pretty cool—even if they aren’t native as they are fast disappearing from their native ranges.

The green parakeet habitat ranges from Southern Texas, into Mexico and Nicaragua. When I was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the Lacondon jungle, young boys would try to sell the caged birds to the tourists. We would make jokes and tell them in Spanish that we would buy one when the green parrots were ripe. They sheepishly got the joke, Spanish being their second language as well.

There are nearly a dozen permanent feral parrot species residing in the urban wilderness of California. San Diego’s wild parrots divide their time between Mexico and the San Diego beaches, LA has the most diverse large flocks of wild escapee parrots, and San Francisco runs a close second. Homeless musician Mark Bittner wrote a book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill which was turned into a PBS documentary of the same name by Judy Irving in 2003. The two met, fell in love and were married in 2008.

The San Francisco parrots, the chatty cherry-headed conures or red-masked parakeets, are native to northwest South America, especially Ecuador and Peru, while the mitered conures hail from Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. And apparently there is one lonesome blue-crowned conure in the mixed species flock as well. These raucous and saucy urban creatures have resided on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, since at least the 1980s—possible escapees from a pet store. 

According to a parrot organization blog, The Wild Parrots of Southern California, the species include:

Red-crowned Amazon (Amazona viridigenalis) or Red-crowned Parrot
Lilac-crowned Amazon (Amazona finschi) or Lilac-crowned Parrot
Red-lored Amazon (Amazona autumnalis) or Red-lored Parrot
Mitred Parakeet (Psittacara mitratus)
Red-masked Parakeet (Psittacara erythrogenys)
Blue-crowned Parakeet (Psittacara acuticaudatus)
Rose-ringed Parakeet (Psittacula krameri)
Yellow-chevroned Parakeet (Brotogeris chiriri)
Black-hooded Parakeet (Aratinga nenday)

Less common are:

Yellow-headed Amazon (Amazona oratrix) or Yellow-headed Parrot
Turquoise-fronted Amazon (Amazona aestiva) or Turquoise-fronted Parrot
White-fronted Amazon (Amazona albifrons) or White-fronted Parrot

At this point, you might be asking what’s the difference between a parrot and a parakeet. One big difference is their size and their ability to mimic sound. Parrots are big, have a more robust curved beak and are excellent imitators of human speech, while the slender parakeets are the Grateful Dead groupies of the parrot world as they have more vibrant markings and mindlessly jabber on endlessly with no end in sight.

The colorful Carolina parakeet, once native to the Eastern seaboard, the Midwest, and Plains states, was declared extinct in the 1920s. There were once other parrots species found in New Mexico pueblos. Indigenous peoples were captive-breeding neotropical scarlet macaws more than a thousand years ago. (Forbes). Other bird bones found in pre-Columbian Native American religious sites included the military macaw, and extirpated native thick-billed macaw, or conure, that was once native to Arizona, Texas and New Mexico as well as Mexico.

Ironically, many of these border-crashing parrot species sans green cards are on the endangered species list in their native lands, but most seem to be alive and well and breeding like rabbits in California. But California isn’t the only last parrot refuge. Florida hosts sizable populations as well as does southern Texas. So I suspect that other southern states have flocks of feral parrots as well. I guess we will have to shelve that dead parrot sketch thanks to all those escapee pet shop birds alive and well and living in the USA. No stinkin’ cages.

Not only that, the randy urban parrots on permanent vacation don’t bother to wait for spring nookie—they seem to be mating year-round, raising healthy clutches of chicks—unlike that rare befuddled kiwi cousin, the endangered kakapo shagging a zoologist’s head. One way or another, I guess we’ll always have parrots.