Feral Parrots Land in Lower Manhattan

Parrot near Brooklyn College

Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx has had colonies of parrots for a while, but now the little green birds may be starting a colony in lower Manhattan. Dennis Edge, a friendly birder who is compiling a book of his many finds around Tompkins Square Park, says he's seen at least two for a couple months in Tompkins and nearby community gardens.

It's too late to be building a nest for eggs, he says, but the birds seem to be building something--like one of their insanely huge colony nests, which can grow to the size of a smartcar. No one knows where, but once the colony gets going, it's huge and they like to build them on tall towers (or trees in a pinch), so it shouldn't be hard to fine in the East Village.

Steve Baldwin has done an amazing job tracking and advocating for the monk parakeets or Quaker parrots at BrooklynParrots.com. He gives free, frequent tours by Brooklyn College and Greenwood Cemetery. At one point he had a highly-detailed map on his site of nests around  New York City and New Jersey, but he took it down after reports of men showing up in vans and grabbing birds.

These huge nests make the parrots unpopular.

The feral parrots x are from South America, but have shown up in cities worldwide, even cold ones, usually with a myth about them escaping from an airport crate. They run into trouble for destroying crops and messing with electrical lines when they build their huge nests. But people love them. And they're an okay replacement species for the Carolina Parakeet that we Americans wiped out a century ago.

Now that red-tailed hawks are becoming commonplace, it's fun to have a new freaky species to look for.

Where to Go to See Parrots in the U.S.
Check Out BrooklynParrots.com