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| Bhangra Muffin |
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3869815.stm
Wild parrots settle in suburbs
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
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| BRAINIAC |
In article <d4ebd8c1.0407110409.5f66374d@posting.google.com>,
Bhangra Muffin <Bhangram@hotmail.com> wrote:
>From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3869815.stm
>
>Wild parrots settle in suburbs
>
In America we have the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918 which
makes it illegal to even touch a dead bird. Great Britain is
a signatory to the treaty so I am sure you have the same rules
and laws that we do. The only songbirds that aren't protected
here are Weaver Finches (house sparrows), European Starlings,
and a few birds in which waivers exist to allow hunting, mainly
Mourning Doves and Crows.
Are these feral parrots covered by the treaty ? If not there
is no reason you couldn't capture one and make a pet out of it.
Lots of people keep Starlings here as pets. I have to admit
if it was legal and I had a parrot nest nearby I would be
very tempted to grab a chick and tame it.
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| Malcolm |
In article <40f250da$0$227$a1866201@newsreader.visi.com>, BRAINIAC
<brainiac@visi.com> writes
>In article <d4ebd8c1.0407110409.5f66374d@posting.google.com>,
>Bhangra Muffin <Bhangram@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3869815.stm
>>
>>Wild parrots settle in suburbs
>>
>
>In America we have the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918 which
>makes it illegal to even touch a dead bird. Great Britain is
>a signatory to the treaty so I am sure you have the same rules
>and laws that we do.
Great Britain was only a signatory to that Treaty because at that time
Canada was not an independent state but a British colony. The terms of
the Treaty were confined to North America and didn't, and don't, apply
to the UK. It is indeed one of the ironies of British conservation that
it signed the MBT in 1918 and didn't get round to equivalent laws here
until 1954.
>The only songbirds that aren't protected
>here are Weaver Finches (house sparrows), European Starlings,
>and a few birds in which waivers exist to allow hunting, mainly
>Mourning Doves and Crows.
>
>Are these feral parrots covered by the treaty ?
They are protected species under UK law.
>If not there
>is no reason you couldn't capture one and make a pet out of it.
>Lots of people keep Starlings here as pets. I have to admit
>if it was legal and I had a parrot nest nearby I would be
>very tempted to grab a chick and tame it.
Not recommended in the UK.
--
Malcolm
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| toller |
There is (or at least was) a large nest of monk parakeets in Lincoln Park in
Chicago. Some people tried to steal them (though God only knows why anyone
would want a monk parakeet) but as chance would have it, the nest was right
next to the mayor's apartment, and his guards broke it up.
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