City Parrots

By Will Bigham, Staff Writer dailybulletin.com

The Pomona Valley’s newest arrivals did not come quietly.

The large colony of wild parrots first appeared about three weeks ago, north Pomona and Claremont residents say. Perched high in neighborhood trees, they roost in flocks of hundreds.

The birds retire for the night at dusk, and as the sun rises, they begin waking and squawking loudly - louder than a lawn mower and louder than screaming schoolchildren.

They are so loud that residents can’t sleep. The most common comparison: the killer birds that terrorize Bodega Bay in Alfred Hitchcock’s apocalyptic classic “The Birds.”

“It’s awful,” said Pomona resident Diana Bitner, who is stirred awake each morning by the cacophonous birds that line Grove Street. “They’re here morning and night.”

But the noise isn’t the only thing about the birds that shocks.

That’s because the birds are native to tropical northeast Mexico. The birds, red-crowned parrots, are believed to have splintered off from a colony of up to 3,000 that has been living in and around Temple City for decades.

The 6- to 8-inch birds, green in color with red feathers covering the tops of their heads, are descendents of parrots that were removed from their natural habitat and brought to Southern California to be sold as pets.

How they escaped is something that’s still debated - some urban legends speculate the birds were set free in the early 1960s by firefighters battling a pet store blaze, others repeat the tale that bird smugglers let loose their potentially damaging evidence to elude suspicion.

“Everybody has their own stories on how flocks got loose, and some of the stories may be true, and some may not be,” said Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “Most likely some of the populations were established when entire shipments” were let loose or escaped.

The wild parrots were spotted in flocks of about a dozen beginning in the early 1970s. But with plentiful food sources and no regional predators, the birds multiplied swiftly.

“Parrots live 30 to 40 years, so that helps,” said Dan Guthrie, president of the Pomona Valley Audubon Society. “If they have one or two babies a year and live that long, they can get their numbers up pretty well.”

The birds may be moving east this year because the flock in Temple City has simply grown too large, Guthrie said. From that roosting site, there may not be enough food sources close by to support the growing colony. So now they’ve set off for a new feeding ground - the rough area being between Garey Avenue in Pomona and Mountain Avenue in Claremont, just south of Foothill Boulevard.

“In recent years there have been parrots in the Pomona-Claremont area, but now it appears there are much larger flocks,” Garrett said. “Something different is happening this year.”

Liz Delcampo recalled when the parrots arrived in her neighborhood, on Santa Clara Avenue in Claremont across the street from Mountain View Elementary School.

“They were in the tree,” she said, pointing to the large jacaranda tree in front of her house. “There were about 70 of them.”

The birds would arrive in the early morning and eat seed pods, sometimes staying perched in the branches the entire day before leaving en masse at dusk.

But the most memorable part? “They were loud,” Delcampo said. “In the afternoon they were really loud - louder than the school. ... And each day it kept getting louder and louder.”

Her elementary school-age children who attend Mountain View said their teachers took them on field trips to view the birds, and some students even wrote reports on the odd phenomenon. But after three or four days, the birds stopped showing up.

About a quarter mile west, on Richbrook Drive, Rob Daniel said he can remember seeing the parrots since his family first moved into their home about seven years ago. But this year’s flocks are larger - and louder. When he leaves his house, he’s “taken aback” by the noise.

The birds are “just as loud as this guy running the weed whacker through here,” he said, nodding toward the gardener who was touching up his back lawn. “They’d sit on the power lines and just caw at each other.”

Despite the aural nuisance, Daniel said he appreciates the exotic newcomers. “It’s nice for us, because in the middle of the city we sometimes have wildlife coming through,” he said. “It lets us forget we live in the hustle and bustle.”

Urban parrot populations are a nationwide and even worldwide phenomenon. Flocks of exotic non-native birds live in Florida, Texas, San Francisco, Chicago and even Brooklyn, all places where the birds were at one time imported as pets.

But Garrett says the San Gabriel Valley’s wild parrot population is likely the largest in the nation. The estimated red-crowned parrot population in the area represents upward of 25 percent of that species’ world population.

Other wild parrot colonies live near the Los Angeles Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, and in Malibu, San Diego and other scattered regional cities.

Wild parrot facts