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Parrots Abroad
| Article
# : |
11079 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
1,935 Words |
| Author
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Dwight G. Smith
Dwight G. Smith is professor and chairman of the biology
department at Southern Connecticut State University in New
Haven. His latest book, Plants, was released this summer by
Pearson Publishing Company of Boston. |
Some of Chicago's most illustrious recent immigrants are noisy and colorful parrots that have taken up residence in the city parks. Locals call them the "Hyde Park parrots" because of their constant chatter, but they are more correctly known to ornithologists as monk parakeets. These bright green parrots have added an exotic touch of color and sound to a number of towns and cities across the country and promise to be North America's first parrots since the demise and extinction of the Carolina parakeet at the turn of the century.
Originally a native of the temperate regions of South America, monk parakeets were first reported seen in small numbers in the wilds of Florida in 1967. The first nesting records date from 1968, although the birds may have nested in earlier years as well. Within a decade, nesting colonies of these exotic parrots became established at widely scattered localities along the Atlantic Coast states, from Massachusetts and Rhode Island through Virginia and into Florida, and westward to Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and California. Monk parakeet colonies in the United States are consistently found in parks and other open space habitats of cities and suburbs. But in South America these parrots are more often associated with rural, agrarian habitats such as farms and orchards; this suggests the possibility of their future dispersal into America's interior farmlands, where they could become a serious agricultural pest. For this reason, the monk parakeet is no longer found in U.S. pet stores.
To curtail further expansion of the rapidly growing monk parakeet population, state and federal agencies attempted an ambitious program to eradicate local populations in several eastern states and California in the early 1970s. The concern of wildlife personnel at this time is captured in a letter written by O.E. Beckley, a Department of the Interior wildlife manager who stated, "We are anxious to eradicate this species whenever possible since we feel it is a potential threat." Several dozen nesting colonies were destroyed and several hundred birds were captured and subsequently killed, but a few individuals managed to escape and immediately started rebuilding the lost colonies.
No further eradication programs were conducted, and monk parakeet populations have been slowly but steadily increasing and expanding their range again. Many ornithologists now feel that the existing colonies should be left alone; in Connecticut, the monk parakeet has been a state breeding bird species for two decades, and most of the state's birders want to include the monk parakeet on the state's list of indigenous avifauna.
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