Leave the pretty parakeets alone!
RING-NECKED parakeets, Britain’s fastest-spreading bird species, could be culled because they are considered to be the ‘grey squirrels of the sky’ (Mail). I would like to take issue with this negative view of these birds. They bring a splash of colour to the countryside, especially during the grey, dark and dismal days of winter. I enjoy catching a glimpse of them on my daily walks. They are certainly not the most thuggish bird species. What about carrion crows and rooks, which peck out the eyes of newborn lambs? Or how about magpies, which destroy smaller birds’ nests, steal their eggs and kill fledglings? Leave the parakeets alone!
R. THOMPSON, Egham, Surrey. ANYONE who believes the release of Jimi Hendrix’s pet parakeets, Adam and Eve, in London’s Carnaby Street in 1968 were the ancestors of Britain’s fast-growing population of ring-necked parakeets has been smoking too much Purple Haze. The first ring-necks appeared here in the 19th century and were established in Greater London by the early 1970s. The birds released in 1951 from the Isleworth Studios set of The African Queen, the film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, weren’t ring-necks, but Quaker parakeets. There was a colony for a number of years in Surrey. Mass escapes from airport containers is a more likely way in which feral parrots have increased their numbers in Britain and worldwide. The first colonies in Spain, Germany and the U.S. were close to airports. In the 1980s, they were abundant around Osterley Park and Richmond, which as the parakeet flies is not too far from Heathrow. The area around Los Angeles airport has a thriving feral parrot population. Miami airport was a major destination for exotic bird consignments and has the most feral parrot species of any U.S. state. Unlike Britain, which is threatening a cull, the U.S. celebrates its non-native parrots and a number of universities have conducted studies of them. The RSPB is sensibly opposed to the proposed cull. The description of them as flying grey squirrels by Tony Juniper, the former director of Friends of the Earth, is a knee-jerk criticism of a non-native species. The predicted competition with native birds over tree nesting holes never happened because parakeets nest earlier in the year. Starlings are much more troublesome to woodpeckers and nuthatches, forcing them to change their nesting patterns. Ring-necks aren’t native, but neither are many other species that enrich our landscape. Seen against a backdrop of non-native trees, such as horse chestnut, London plane and sycamore, they lift the spirits, which is much needed in these uncertain times.