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.

There are four very similar sub-species of this parakeet in the wild, two living in Africa and two in south Asia. They are regarded as agricultural pests and, as a result, have been persecuted and numbers in the wild are declining. However, there is a very long tradition of keeping them as cage birds. This goes back at least as far as classical Greek and Roman times. There is also a long tradition of them either escaping or being deliberately released and in many places around the world they have shown a remarkable ability to survive and form flourishing feral colonies.

They can withstand cold winters and, unlike most parrots and parakeets, which are shy forest birds, they seem to thrive in cities, particularly in city parks. The sources I consulted didn’t mention a colony in Istanbul but did say there was one in Ankara, which is not that far away, and I’m sure that these were the birds my son had seen.

However, there are free-flying parakeets a lot closer to us than Turkey is. In fact there are colonies in London, mainly in the south and west of the city, and the various flocks together number close to 20,000 birds. There are also smaller flocks in several other English towns and cities, mostly in the southern half of the country. There are huge flocks in Holland and Belgium and smaller ones in Germany, France and Italy. They are also found in cities in faraway places like Japan, Australia and north America.

An exotic bird species that is declining in most parts of its native range seems to be ensuring its future by adapting to city life on a global scale. Urban parks provide it with the fruit, seeds and shoots to survive and in some cities it augments its diet by visiting garden birdfeeders or living, like the feral pigeon, on crumbs and scraps.

It’s probably only a matter of time before we have a flock of parakeets in one of our cities.