Birds in Winter

I'm going for sparrow, pigeon and parrot. The cat reckons "food, food, and exotic food".

Bob

...and the parrot being a "quaker".

Ray

Cool! I've never seen quakers in the snow before. I didn't know they could survive when the temperatures got so low. I think Bob is right about the sparrows but I think that the others are doves.

Monk parakeet, mourning dove, house sparrow.

This site has a video of the parrots

http://www.brooklynparrots.com/2007/02/video-short-wild-quaker-parrots-…

At about 3:44 in the video there is a scene of them eating snow.

The parrots are a temperate, rather than a tropical, species. They are established, and spreading, in several places in North America.

I've had these parrots in my backyard. They're common in my neighborhood. I call them "Brooklyn's most charismatic invasive species." In September of last year, I had a letter published in the New York Times Science section about this issue.

The (unattributed) photo is from Steve Baldwin's Brooklyn Parrots Web site. It's the third photo on his blog post, Wild Parrots in the Snow, from December, 2005. His contact information is on his Web site.

Monk parakeets on the coast south of Houston build their large nests under electrical transformers on eletric poles, leading to the inevitable transformer blowouts. I have to respect their sheer racket when one walks near and startles the guard bird into flushing a group feeding on the ground.

We have a pretty large (and loud) flock of monk parakeets in one of the beach towns in southern Delaware. My understanding, at least from my avian biology class 13 years ago, is that the populations of these birds in the northeast originated from some caged parakeets that escaped from LaGuardia airport in the late sixties. According to my professor at the time, food rather than temperature would be the limiting factor.

I was pleasantly surprised to disover this conversation going on here. In my view, the fact that there are wild parrots in many urban areas of the USA is a happy instance, given how poorly our nation treated the Carolina Parakeet, our only real "indigenous" parrot. Fortunately, Argentina sent us a fitting replacement!

I uploaded another video recently showing the parrots frolicking in the snow (you can see it by following this link).

best,
Steve Baldwin
The Brooklyn Parrot Society
BrooklynParrots.com

I lived in queens by queens college, and I never saw the monk parakeets. I saw the nests on the lights on the sports fields, but I never saw the birds.

In Austin I see them and hear them all the time probably because I live by a sports field where they build nests on the lights.

I was delighted to see our winged friends in Brooklyn . When I lived and worked in Orange County,Southern California there were many mixed flocks of parrots located in the Tustin / Santa Ana area. everything from Macaws to to parakeets , full of lovely bright colors. It was pure joy to watch them flying free and because of all the fruit trees and crops they "lived well". I heard that the flocks started because a large group of them had been in a private collection and released in the 1960's after the owner died, as part of her will, and then other" escaped "domesticated birds joined the flocks .... or that story could be all an urban legend.

naturalized domestic macaws? really? considering the time frame, those would probably have been wild-caught, i guess, but i can't imagine a hand-raised macaw later surviving in the wild?