Wild Parakeets, Far From Their Native Land, Have Taken A Liking To ...

People seem to either love them or hate them.

Nick Hunt, Author, The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology

One urban myth is that in 1968, Jimi Hendrix, newly arrived in Swinging London, left his flat in Mayfair and walked toward Carnaby Street carrying a bird cage. Then the famous guitarist, who’d recently released the psychedelic album Electric Ladyland, opened the cage and set free two electric-green parakeets. Another story has it that two parakeets were released during the filming of The African Queen, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, in London in 1951.

The truth is more prosaic. As the hub of a global empire for hundreds of years, London was a conduit for every imaginable product and creature. The earliest recorded sighting of a parakeet was in Dulwich, in South London, in 1893. But it was not until the 1950s that the birds became a thing.

“My suspicion is that there were a whole lot of releases over a period of years of pet birds or birds in aviaries,” says Paul Walton, head of habitat and species for the Scottish branch of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). They were either freed deliberately or escaped. “Often what happens is that you get a really small number of breeding populations that could be there for a number of years without being detected.”(Read about how the pet trade itself is threatening some species of parrots.)

By the 1980s, a sizable colony existed in Kingston-on-Thames, in the southwestern part of the city. Since then, the parakeets have spread like a green wave right across the capital. Nick Hunt, author of The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology, calls it “one the most audacious ecological shifts in the world.”

Why have they been so successful? One reason is that London—with 47 percent of its area given over to green space, including 3,000 parks, three million private gardens, not to mention a huge number of allotments, or garden plots, and sprawling Victorian cemeteries—is the perfect city for birds. And England’s mild winters, which are becoming more temperate, present no obstacle to their survival. (Cemeteries have become havens for urban wildlife.)