My friendly neighbourhood Italian restaurant on the edge of Clapham Common often throws open its sliding doors throughout London’s increasingly hot summers to operate as a sort of inside-outside eatery.
On Sunday evening, as I fought back tears brought on by its spicy nduja, I noticed the staff converging on the terrace outside, from where they oohed and aahed at a sight up the road. I soon spotted the objects of their attention, as a barrage of easily 100 or more bright green flashes flew past in a straight line at the height of a double decker bus.
Colonies of red-necked parakeets, a type of exotic small parrot originally from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, have established themselves all over the leafiest parts of London and surrounding counties in England’s southeast, the warmest part of Britain. They were flying up the common on their way for a night’s kip.
They are beautiful birds. They are also notorious, dividing Londoners like few other creatures. They squawk relentlessly, they squeeze out native British species, they defecate all over the locals’ Range Rovers and, when they migrate to more rural areas, parakeets are said to gobble up the grapes that winemakers use to produce English fizz.
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No wonder hunting groups have formally asked the UK government for permission to blow them out of the sky. A decision is believed to be imminent. Some conservation groups are up in arms.
Love them or hate them, wild parakeets are now an everyday part of life in southwest London in particular. After screeching relentlessly at each other all day up in the high branches, they roost together at night in huge numbers in the area’s plethora of parks.
Southwest London, and the whole city in general, is blessed with an abundance of green spaces. Good news for dog walkers, joggers and crazily boisterous non-native bird species. Bad news for anyone living nearby who may be trying to get their kids off to sleep.
Londoners love to trade theories about how these striking exotic birds, sometimes dismissed as “posh pigeons”, came to be so numerous in recent years in London, from where they are spreading north. Their favourite line is that rock star Jimi Hendrix released a pair on Carnaby Street in the 1960s and, like an avian Adam and Eve, the rest are their descendants.
Another popular theory is that parakeets escaped from the London set of the 1951 film African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.
Most British naturalists, however, agree that London and Britain’s burgeoning wild parakeet population originated from the trend in decades past to import exotic birds to be kept in livingroom cages. Many simply escaped or were let free.
Who’s a pretty boy, then, until he squeezes out all the British spotted woodpeckers and destroys all the fruit for English sparkling wine? They are also partial to plums and other fruit routinely grown as crops.
Tim Blackburn, the professor of invasion biology at University College London, was recently quoted in the city’s edition of Time Out magazine touting another highly interesting explanation that sounds infinitely more plausible than the Hendrix theory.
“In the 1950s there was a health scare around a disease called psittacosis – or Parrot Fever – and it scared people into opening the cage and setting [their birds] free,” he said.
Whatever the genesis of the local populations of these immigrant birds and their descendants, some Londoners believe they’ve got to go. Fruit farmers in the home counties are almost genocidal in their thinking.
Scientists, meanwhile, seem split in their opinion on whether they really do significant harm to native British species. Both sides duked it out in a recent documentary by naturalist Chris Packham, called Invasion of the Parakeets.
Blackburn warned that elsewhere in Europe, they have damaged bat populations. Parakeets, which are territorial by nature, also nest in holes in mature deciduous trees – not good for British bird species such as nuthatches.
Defra, the UK government’s department for environment, food and rural affairs, earlier this summer opened a public consultation on Britain’s bird “quarry list”, the official list of wildlife species that can be shot by any licensed gun owner for recreational purposes. Currently, parakeets can only be shot in England if they are doing serious damage to crops, while it is almost impossible to legally shoot them elsewhere in Britain.
The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) submitted a formal proposal to add two types of the exotic birds – the Monk parakeet variety is also in its crosshairs – to the quarry list. This would allow recreational shooters to hunt them in autumn and winter, outside of their breeding season.
A government decision was due by August 10th, but so far, the bureaucrats haven’t pulled the trigger on a formal response. Perhaps they’re worried about the optics of Barbour-wearing shooters stalking little green birds among middle-class families in Richmond Park.
BASC also lobbied to add a further 22 species to the quarry kill list, but there has only been a kerfuffle about the parakeets. The hunting association also wants British shooters to be allowed to target seaside gulls. That’s what they get for stealing all those bags of chips.
