The march of the parakeet

My son is just back from a trip to Istanbul, a city I’ve never visited myself. When he came round to tell us about the trip and show off his photos I was intrigued by his account of seeing wild parrots in one of the city parks, writes Dick Warner.

He was in the European part of Istanbul and, as far as I knew, there were no wild parrots in Europe.

I soon found out that my assumption was only partly true. He had given a good description of what the birds looked like and sounded like and I was quickly able to identify them as Psittacula krameri, sometimes called the ring-necked parakeet and sometimes the rose-necked parakeet. They are large, long-tailed parakeets, predominantly green in colour, though the underparts are quite pale making them look a sort of off-white colour in flight. Adult males have a black and pink neck ring and they live in noisy flocks.