City Parrots

New Haven Register by Ed Stannard

The monk parakeets that choose utility poles as the real estate for their large nests will be evicted next week, but they won’t be executed.

United Illuminating Co. said Friday that it will remove 89 nests from its equipment starting Tuesday, which it has done about every six months since March 2006.

West Haven is home to the most nests - 56 - with 18 in the Lordship section of Stratford and others scattered in East Haven, New Haven, Milford, Bridgeport and, for the first time, Hamden. That inland town has three nests scheduled for demolition on State Street and Foote Avenue, according to Al Carbone, UI spokesman.

“Our problem is, because they’re on our poles, the risk is they cause power outages; they’ve caused fires,” Carbone said Friday.

He said the nests are demolished in the spring and fall to coincide with the beginning and end of the birds’ breeding season. But it doesn’t take long for the homeless birds to start gathering sticks.

“It’s been our experience that after a day or two they just start building them again,” Carbone said.

UI will not remove nests built in trees and bushes, he said, and also has not repeated the controversy of November 2005, when the electric utility captured the birds and turned them over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which gassed them.

“When our trucks come up to the nests, the birds just fly away,” Carbone said. Those that don’t will leave once the workers begin pulling down the nests, he said.

Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, said she’s glad UI doesn’t plan to euthanize the birds, but believes the company can do more to avoid harming them.”

“The savagery in which they approach that nest destruction is probably something that should be addressed,” she said.

Feral questioned why the company would wait until so close to the cold winter months to tear down the nests. “They’ve treated a bird that graces our landscape here as if it were vermin,” she said.

Carbone said the parakeets are native to the Andes and “they’ve proven that they can handle any conditions.”

Monk parakeets, also known as Quaker parrots, are native to Argentina and neighboring countries in South America. They build nests that can weigh more than 150 pounds, Carbone said, with hundreds of chattering green birds.

The 2005 eradication brought a lawsuit from Friends of Animals, a Darien-based organization, which is seeking a permanent injunction against killing the birds. The case is scheduled to be tried in May.

UI covers the New Haven and Bridgeport areas. Mitchell Gross, spokesman of Connecticut Light & Power, the electric utility for most of the rest of Connecticut, said, “We don’t have the issue they do.”

While the parrots have long resided in Branford, and gained both fame and enmity in the Short Beach section, they have not chosen to build on CL&P’s equipment, Gross said, though he did not know why that’s so.

“Apparently, they seem to be concentrated in UI territory,” he said.