City Parrots

MiamiHerald.com by Georgia Tasker

When they first arrived, I would stand motionless, lest I scare them. Even after weeks of watching them, I still pause whenever they appear.

They are gorgeous blue and gold macaws. One of them has raggedy tail feathers. Both have that unmistakable scream, deep throated and meant to be heard across the rain forest. From time to time, they set to work on the headless royal palm, ripping at the trunk with their beaks, teasing us with the thought that they might nest in the cavity they’ve created.

It has been a busy spring around the backyard, made even busier by the frondless royal palm.

Vying with the big three-foot parrots are two red-masked conures, who perch on the cavity’s edge when the macaws aren’t around. They’re not as elegant as the parrots and only a third their size, but with their yellow eye rings and bright red heads, they’re cuter.

Woodpeckers worked all day recently to hollow out a cavity below where the parrots were working. The next day, the pair was displaced by starlings, despite the woodpeckers’ divebombing and fussing. The starlings got their comeuppance when the macaws returned and ripped away that nest.

Occasionally, whistling myna birds perch on the top of the palm, and a hawk has used it as a watchtower. Yet it is the parrots that are so fascinating to watch.

There are between 5,000 and 10,000 parrots flying free from Palm Beach County through Miami-Dade, says Bill Pranty, who is on the Florida Ornithological Society’s records committee and who tallies the results of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count for the state.

‘’They come from private pet owners who got sick of a parrot squawking or someone losing a parrot,’’ he says. ``Following Hurricane Andrew, a lot of backyard aviculturists whose screens were destroyed lost their birds. Metrozoo lost theirs.’’

Susan Cobb, the avian veterinarian for the old Parrot Jungle as well as Jungle Island, says almost everyone believes the naturalized parrots have come from Parrot Jungle. Not, she says. ``During Hurricane Andrew we didn’t lose a single bird.’’

Twenty years ago, when Parrot Jungle was still in Pinecrest, there were macaws that flew free from the tourist attraction during the day, but were trained to return in the late afternoon to be fed and housed for the night, she said.

Yet here over the years, the parrots have multiplied, filling our multiethnic bird-sky.

DOZENS OF SPECIES

Susan Epps, a former Fort Lauderdale resident who now lives in Diamond Head, Miss., has written Parrots of South Florida, (Pineapple Press, $12.95). She has documented 32 different parrots and parakeets here. Pranty says 76 or 77 species have been seen, including hyacinth macaws. There are fewer than 10 pairs of blue and gold macaws reported to be nesting in South Florida, he says.

The Audubon Society only records four parrots as established in our region: budgies, monk parakeets, white-winged parakeets and-black hooded parakeets.

‘’The main reason parrots survive in Florida, southern Texas, southern California and Hawaii is the temperature,’’ says Pranty. ``Parrots are almost exclusively tropical species. They survive well in Miami because the climate never gets too cold.’’

Temperatures in the 40s means the birds simply fluff their down and nuzzle together in social groups.

‘’And West Palm Beach to Homestead is extensively landscaped with plants from around world, so parrots can find some fruit from their native range,’’ Pranty says. ``There are trees in fruit or flower year-round in South Florida, plus there are probably tens of thousands of bird feeders. They’ll eat almost anything.’’

Epps began studying parrots when a pair of Amazons roosted in a tree across from her house. ‘’I would see them every day and was captivated,’’ she said. ``I got to the point where I paid more attention and bought Parrots of the World and managed to identify a lot of birds.’’

Then she began driving around town ``with the car windows rolled down, listening. I’d stop and find them.’’

She wanted to find out what they ate, so she took four plant identification classes at Broward Community College. ‘’I identified 80 plants and had documentation of 70,’’ she said. But all her notes and photos were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, shortly after she moved to Mississippi.

Now working on Parrots of the United States, Epps has traveled to Arizona, where she found love birds nesting, and Seattle, which has red-fronted conures.

‘’My main purpose is to document that these birds are not going to become agricultural pests,’’ she said. ``There’s too much yummy stuff in the towns.’’

In 2000, however, Eric Tillman with the National Wildlife Research Center in Gainesville was one of three scientists to document bird damage to fruit crops in South Florida. They found that monk parakeets ate longans, as did grackles, and recommended netting the trees. In all, 43 species of birds ate tropical lychees, longans, carambolas, avocados and mangoes but only six were non-natives, the researchers found, and only one was the monk parrot.

CROP DAMAGE

Pranty says parrots probably damage crops ``to some extent. Certainly the monks do, which are so abundant they’ll impact something sooner or later. They’re impacting FPL. But continuing development is a bigger threat than parrots.’’

Epps says some of the food that parrots prefer includes blossoms of the African tulip tree, nuts of the areca palm, cones of Australian pines, seeds of the Australian silk oak, seeds of bischofia trees, bottle brush flowers, Brazilian pepper fruits, developing coconuts, mangoes, sea grapes, flowers of orchid trees, acorns and fruit from the strangler fig.

Tropical Audubon’s website has a bird board where people can record what birds they spot. Both Epps and Pranty caution against telling people where parrots are nesting, however, because local trappers may steal the babies and sell them to pet shops.

Our backyard macaws are still unsure of whether they’d like to nest.

And there are two schools of thought about whether the parrots will nest because the cavity has no top.

Pranty thinks the pair of macaws may be young and just playing. So does Carl Burch, the zoological supervisor in the MetroZoo aviary. Burch says, ‘’My guess is they’re inexperienced nesters; they’re just chewing and having fun.’’ Macaws are such chewers, he says, they are not kept in the aviary.

OLD CAVITIES

Pranty says parrots usually find old cavities left by woodpeckers.

‘’Woodpeckers roost in cavities year round and each has its own cavity,’’ he says. ``Then in nesting season, they build a second one. In all species of woodpeckers, they use the nest once and create a new cavity next year. So there are all these unused cavities available for squirrels or screech owls or parrots.’’

Epps is more optimistic.

``They don’t need a top. The nest will get some rain in there and momma’s sitting on the eggs, so it’s OK.’’

So far, neither the macaws nor the conures have settled in. They visit and sit on the side of the nest site, then take off, sometimes reappearing briefly in the evening. But if someone does nest, and babies fledge, you’ll be the first to know. Hope is a thing with feathers.