Wild parrots settle in suburbs
By Sean Coughlan,BBC News education
The number of wild parrots living in England is rising at 30% per year, says an Oxford University research project.
Parks and gardens in the leafy London suburbs have been adopted as a preferred habitat by birds that are native to southern Asia.
In the Surrey stockbroker belt, a single sports ground is believed to be home to about 3,000 parrots.
The rate of increase, helped by mild winters, is much greater than had been expected.
The findings have also been echoed by a large number of e-mails from BBC News Online readers, who have reported how parrots - particularly parakeets - have now become familiar sights.
Parrot hotspots
These hundreds of e-mails, including photographs, highlighted hotspots such as west of London, Surrey and parts of Kent.
But there were also parrots reported in inner-London, including parks in Peckham, Brixton, Greenwich and Kensington.
And a few parrots had been spotted in East Anglia, the North West and in Scotland.
There were also sightings from readers overseas, reporting urban parrots in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain and the United States.
E-mails from readers also offer a range of theories about the arrival of parrots in Britain - including that they were brought by Jimi Hendrix, that they escaped during the making of a film and that they were released from aviaries damaged during the great storm of 1987.
Researchers have been tracking several varieties of parakeet, originally from countries such as India and Brazil, but which are now surviving in ever-greater numbers in southern England.
The findings, from Oxford University’s Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, give a glimpse of exotic creatures in unlikely places.
Alexandrine parakeets have been spotted by Lewisham crematorium and orange-winged parakeets, native to the Amazon, have now set up home in Weybridge.
South American monk parakeets have formed a colony in Borehamwood and blue-crowned parakeets were observed in Bromley.
There have been reports that there could now be 20,000 wild parrots, including parakeets, living in England, with the largest concentration around London and the South East.
The population boom has been put down to a series of mild winters, a lack of natural predators, food being available from humans and that there are now enough parrots for a wider range of breeding partners.
In particular, they have been observed in growing numbers in the outer suburbs and the Home Counties, with trees in parkland and sports grounds becoming their homes.
Rugby fans
Esher Rugby Club’s ground was observed to have had a parrot population that grew from 800 to 2,500 in the space of three years - and researchers estimate there might be 3,000 living there.
Project Parakeet, led by researcher Chris Butler, has been examining the growth of the population of wild parakeets - with the aim of finding whether the current sharp increase will continue.
If it does, there are concerns that wild parrots could become a pest to farmers or threaten other wildlife.
Grahame Madge, spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), says parakeets are bigger and bolder than some of their native rivals - and “are quite capable of evicting other birds”.
They also like fruit and he says that if they moved into fruit-growing areas, it would pose problems for farmers.
Heathrow flights
At present, the RSPB says parakeets are particularly concentrated in the west London, south-west London and Thames Valley area - and this has given rise to the urban legend that the birds originally escaped from a container at Heathrow airport.
But Mr Madge says there has never been any proof of this theory.
Escaped parakeets have been spotted nesting in this country since the 19th Century. Even though there was a wild population in the 1960s, the numbers remained very low through to the mid-1990s, when the population appeared to start increasing more rapidly.
Birdline UK’s Parrot Rescue, which looks after abandoned birds, says parrots are now acclimatised to conditions in this country and are quite capable of living and breeding here.
But this is causing problems for other native birds, which are being pushed out by the growing numbers of parrots.