City ParrotsUrban Scarlet Macaw & Parrot Conservation

The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn’s legendary Monk parrots have migrated to Park Slope.

A flock of about five bright green tropical parrots — an offshoot of the borough’s legendary wild parrot community in Midwood — has been spotted hanging out in a tree on the corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Brett Cleaver, who lives on nearby 13th Street, has seen the bright green birds twice in a matter of four days.

“They were cute,” said Cleaver. “It seemed like there were two couples, and an odd man out. A couple of them were kissing. People were stopping and looking — it was certainly a spectacle.” Read on…

Temple Daily Telegram by Robert Stinson

Although residents around 31st Street can tell you a flock of parrots has had a nest on a power pole in the area for at least 10 years now, how they got there is a matter of speculation.

The predominantly green parrots, the population of which has varied from a reported one to 12, has been at work over the years enlarging what is now a sizable nest of sticks that looks like a big clump of flotsam with a hole burrowed in it.

Numerous bird–related Web sites list the monk parakeet as the only bird in the parrot family that builds stick nests. Often those nests are located on power poles and have multiple living chambers.

The Temple parrots’ nest is nestled in a capacitor bank at the top of a pole in front of the CEFCO Canyon Creek Convenience Store and Car Wash, located at 3805 S. 31st St. Read on…

New Haven Independent by Allan Appel

Noisy new immigrants have been flocking to the Hill, putting up homes in woodsy — uh, very woodsy — one-room condos high above historic City Point.

Who wouldn’t want a rustic room, surrounded by spectacular greenery and panoramic harbor views during all the seasons of the year? Utilities included, of course. Lots of utilities. Although the property is not particularly convenient to mass transit, that shouldn’t be an obstacle, for you probably should have wings if you’re considering joining this ornithological condo association, for all the members are myiopsitta monachus, or monk parakeets. Read on…

The wild parrots of Brooklyn explained By Kiera Butler

If you think you’ve seen a wild parrot in Brooklyn, don’t worry—you’re (probably) not crazy: The borough is home to a few hundred Quaker Parrots (also known as Monk Parakeets). No one knows for sure how these clever little green birds made their way to New York City, but some trace their arrival back to a shipment of pet-store parrots that escaped from Kennedy Airport in the late sixties. These days, they can be found at Brooklyn College, in the Greenwood Cemetery, and in a few other spots around the borough. Read on…

KEN DIXON

The United Illuminating Co. has completed its spring-cleaning program, ripping down monk parakeet nests from nearly 70 utility poles in southwestern Connecticut.

But these tenacious green birds, South American invasives that have lived in colonies along Long Island Sound’s coast since the early 1970s, are already rebuilding their stick homes as they head into their egg-laying season. Read on…

NEW YORK (AP) It’s an urban jungle, alright

Take a walk around the soccer field at Brooklyn College, and there, among the pigeons and starlings, you’ll see them - parrots. Yes, parrots. Bright green feathers, orange beaks, native-to-South-America parrots. Read on…

Chicago Chronicle by Katy Brandt

Alien invaders exist in Chicago; it’s a proven fact. They are little and green, and for the past four decades they have surveyed human life in the city from on high. Read on…

STLtoday by Theresa Tighe

A Quaker parrot named Bobber, who weighs less than a quarter pounder, rules the roost in my house. Every gram of bird is manipulative.

Right now, Bobber is feigning illness. He wants to go to the bird hospital, a place I call the spa. Life there includes sunning to music, high-class human and avian companions and superior food.

In the past, I bought him a new cage, a $150 mansion, big enough for him to take flight, a little, because he could dismantle the older, smaller one and knock his food all over the floor, even when the cage was reinforced with mailing tape. Read on…

By Joe Maniscalco

They’ve become as ubiquitous in many parts of Brooklyn as their much less colorful cousin the pigeon. But friends of the South American Monk Parrots, introduced to Brooklyn more than 30 years ago when a shipment of birds supposedly went awry at JFK Airport, fear that the parrots are now being poached right out of their well-constructed nests located high atop telephone poles all around Midwood and Marine Park. Read on…

Emagazine.com by Jayasudha Joseph

Take a walk through the dense thickets that rim the teeming marshlands along the Connecticut coast, and you may feel like you are exploring a wild South American jungle. That’s because you may hear the loud squawking and shrieking of an import from the Southern Hemisphere, Myiopsitta monachus, known as monk or Quaker parakeets.

Mostly green with yellow bellies and bright blue feathers in their wings and tail, these birds are believed to have first appeared in U.S. skies in the 1960s. Their native homeland ranged from central Bolivia to southern Brazil, Uruguay and southern and central Argentina. Today, these birds can be found in more than a dozen states, including Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Illinois, Oregon, California and much of the Northeast.

According to biologist Stephen Pruett-Jones of the University of Chicago, who has been studying monk parakeets at Illinois’ Hyde Park for more than a decade, there may be as many as 200,000 of these birds nationwide. Read on…