Colourful invader will find its own niche one day
THEIR screaming alerts you to squadrons of fast flying birds overhead.
Ring-necked parakeets now patrol many suburbs throughout the country, including the West Midlands.
Those screams and their crescentshape are reminiscent of summer’s swifts, but these colourful small parrots fly in small flocks, have long tails and are here all year round.
To some they are flamboyant exotics, to others they are vermin – Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England, describes them as “grey squirrels of the sky”. With calls, including a petition, for a cull, parakeets are the latest victim of our ambivalent attitudes to wildlife.
Some dislike them just because they are non-natives, calling them “invasive aliens” whilst lauding other non-natives, such as snowdrops, horse chestnuts and brown hares.
We rightly worry about species doing badly, but don’t like great success either, as with magpies and Canada geese.
Parakeet and Canada goose populations both exploded in my lifetime. In both cases small populations of essentially domesticated birds were around for a century or more, (Canada geese from the 17th century and parakeets from the 19th.)
The parakeets became established in the wild in the 1970s, then their numbers rapidly expanded from the mid-1990s.
Doubtless parakeets will have impacts on other species.
They successfully compete for nesting holes with such as woodpeckers, starlings and nuthatches, as well as some bats.
They are accused of being aggressive, but so are most birds, both to those threatening them and those competing for food and nesting sites. Parakeets are most unlikely to be as big a threat to other wildlife as human are, but they are a convenient scapegoat.
They are also a potential pest to farmers and fruit growers, but there again so are many other birds.
They are already on the list of species it is permissible to control under licence, so the call for a cull is unnecessary.
It would also be a waste of effort; they are now too widespread and numerous for it to succeed.
Successful new arrivals tend to go through a process of establishment. Parakeets are at the second stage, that of rapidly increasing numbers, range, and high impact.
There are though already reports of birds of prey adding them to their menu.
As time passes things will settle down; they will find and fill their niche in our ecosystems. In the meantime, we can enjoy the spectacular antics of this flamboyant addition to our much-depleted wildlife.