The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A monk parakeet sighting in an out-of-the-way place
A bird that doesn’t belong here to begin with showed up at my friend’s house in Danbury, where it most certainly does not belong.
My friend is Bill Leukhardt, who I’ve known for a half-century. He still talks to me. Miracle of miracles.
I think the bird he’s seeing — a green bird with blue feathers underneath its wings — is a monk parakeet. It’s visited his backyard suet feeder sporadically over the past two or three weeks. It’s either strayed from its flock, or an escapee from somebody’s bird cage. It’s a Thelonious Monk parakeet, soloing.
It may be the first time one has shown up in Fairfield County north of the coastline.
Angela Dimmitt of New Milford, who is president of the Western Connecticut Bird Club, said she’s never heard of a monk parakeet sighting in the area.
Neither has Margaret Robbins, owner of the Wild Birds Unlimited store in Brookfield, where birders come in to buy seed and suet, and chatter about sightings.
“No,’ Robbins said. “No one.”
Here is why the monk parakeet doesn’t quite belong anywhere in Danbury, in Connecticut, or in the United States. We have no native parrot or parakeet species.
The Carolina parakeet, once could be found in huge flocks from the Eastern seaboard to the Midwest. Americans in the 19th century treated them the way they treated the passenger pigeon — they hunted them to extinction.
The last sighting of a Carolina parakeet in the wild was in 1904. A single bird, Incas, lived at the Cincinnati Zoo until 1918, in the same cage as Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died in 1914.
But people import parrots and parakeets as pets, by the hundreds of thousands. Sometimes, the birds escape. Sometimes, their owners, tired of their squawking ways, set them free to fend for themselves. Several parrot and parakeet species are living in the U.S., almost all in Florida and California.
No one knows exactly how monk parakeets came to the U.S. Urban legend has it that a crate of the birds crashed on the runway at JFK International Airport in 1967 while being unloaded and the parakeets escaped to start life in the New World.
Whatever the truth, they are the most widely distributed parakeet found in the U.S., nesting from Boston to Houston.
“Chicago is famous for having monk parakeet colonies,” said Ken Elkins, director of the Milford Point Audubon Center, owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society.
The main reason they’ve successfully relocated to so many places is that, rather than nesting in tree hollows like others in the parrot family, monk parakeets build big clumpy nests of sticks. They then live communally in these nests, dozens at a time. They’re apartment dwellers. There’s safety and warmth in numbers. That allows them to survive New England winters.
They are extremely social birds — they stay tight-knit even when they leave the nest to forage for food.
In Connecticut, monk parakeets live in shoreline towns and cities — in Norwalk and Bridgeport, New Haven and Stratford. Because they often build their huge stickladen nest on utility lines, United Illuminating has had to come and break nests apart, lest they cause power outages.
They are now considered an American species. They’ve joined the ranks of starlings, house sparrows, house finches and mute swans — nonnatives that put down roots in the U.S. and made good. Even that most ubiquitous of birds — the pigeon — is an import, brought to the North American shores by European settlers in the 1600s.
But why has a single monk parakeet — not part of a colony — shown up at my friend Bill’s suet feeder in Danbury, where they’ve never been seen?
Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said Bill’s bird may have been part of a colony whose communal quarters got scattered.
“Sometimes, if a nest gets blown down, they may go out in different directions,” Comins said.
Robbins of Wild Bird Unlimited said it may be someone’s pet bird — or ex-pet bird — that’s flown the coop.
“We get a lot of calls about them,” she said.
Elkins said it may simply be a bird that the winds carried to Danbury from parts unknown.
It’s the time of year. Fall storm patterns have brought hummingbirds from western states to Connecticut feeders.
“November is the month when something always shows up,” he said.