Hardy Parakeet Finds Its ‘Ellis Island’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

A green parakeet with a white belly landed in a puddle on the Brooklyn College campus, splashed around, and snuggled up to a pigeon that had likewise flown down for a midday bath. A second parakeet entered the water and began playfully biting the other parakeet’s back with its beak.
Steve Baldwin stood about 10 feet away on this Saturday afternoon, snapping pictures with his Pentax ZXM camera and its 80-320 zoom lens.
“I’m still trying to get my Pulitzer Prize-winning parrot picture,” Mr. Baldwin, who photographs the birds nearly every Saturday, said. He also leads free Wild Parrot tours at least once a month.
Monk parakeets, or Quaker parakeets, as they are sometimes known, are native to South America. The birds arrived in New York in the late 1960s and first nested on the tall light posts overlooking the Brooklyn College soccer field around that time.
“That happened to be the place they landed first,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s kind of like their Ellis Island.”
The reasons they survive in New York, he said, are that they are the only one of more than 300 species from the parakeet-parrot family that can build their own nests, and they eat almost anything, from grass to worms to birdseed.
The birds have spread throughout Brooklyn, from Evergreen Cemetery to Marine Park, nesting mainly on transformers at the tops of tall utility poles. Colonies have also sprung up in Edgewater, N.J., and in a dozen or more other states, from Oregon to Massachusetts. Mr. Baldwin estimates the New York area population of monk parakeets, including Edgewater’s, at 500 birds.
From the time they arrived, however, monk parakeets have clashed with the human population. Worried that the birds would harm native species and eat fruit crops, the government began a program to wipe them out in the early 1970s, Mr. Baldwin said. Though the practice ended decades ago, the parakeets more recently have battled the utility companies that own the transformers on which they nest.
“We’ve had several fires,” a senior scientist for Con Edison who has studied the parakeets for the last four years, Al Williams, said. “The nests will begin to smoke, and we’ve had several problems with low voltages.”
In all, the utility has counted 130 monk parakeet nests on its distribution poles in Brooklyn and parts of Queens, Mr. Williams said. He added that the birds like the transformers because they offer good support and emit warmth, but the nests can block the transformers’ ventilators and cause them to overheat.
Con Ed has removed about 20 nests a year since monk parakeets were blamed for a 2003 brownout in Brooklyn, Mr. Williams said, but the birds are only removed when there is a high risk of electrical disruption.
In Edgewater, a town on the Hudson River across from Columbia University and Washington Heights, Public Service Electric and Gas Company caused a local controversy this year by removing a number of parakeet nests in winter and again in spring.
A nurse-practitioner who lives in Edgewater, Alison Evans-Fragale, became involved in bird activism by protesting the removal of the nest of famed red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola, on Fifth Avenue near 74th Street. She began working with the 150 or so monk parakeets in her town after the nests were taken down for the first time in January, lobbying the state government to change a law that lists the monk parakeet as a “potentially dangerous species.”
“It’s absurd to consider this little green parrot as being as dangerous as a viper or a black bear,” Ms. Evans-Fragale said, referring to other species on that list. Unlike the situation in New York, where the birds can be sold as pets, state law in New Jersey prevents people from handling monk parakeets, even baby birds that have just had their nests removed and can’t survive on their own.
“Anything you do to help the birds will get you a $5,000 fine from New Jersey Fish and Wildlife,” Ms. Evans-Fragale said, adding that the law stops her from putting platforms on poles to encourage nesting above transformers.
After the nests were ripped down for the second time in May, Ms. Evans-Fragale persuaded Edgewater’s mayor, Nancy Merse, and the City Council to pass a resolution asking New Jersey Fish and Wildlife to treat monk parakeets the same as any other non-game indigenous bird species. The measure also asked the utility to treat the birds more humanely.
“What we tried to do by issuing this resolution is to bring attention to the issue,” an Edgewater council member, Maureen Holtje, said.
“I kind of like the birds,” she added. “They don’t bother me.”
On June 23, two members of the New Jersey Assembly, Joan Voss and Robert Gordon, sponsored a bill that would take the monk parakeet off the potentially dangerous list. Ms. Evans-Fragale said she hoped the bill would be voted on this fall when the legislators return from their summer recess.
In the meantime, Ms. Evans-Fragale said, the parakeets rebuilt their nests and laid eggs, but a spokeswoman for the utility, Karen Johnson, said there were plans to take down the nests a third time, possibly in mid-September.
“The only thing it does is cause the birds a lot of stress, and it’s inhumane,” Ms. Evans-Fragale said. “It doesn’t lead to a permanent solution.”
Mr. Williams of Con Ed confirmed that monk parakeets inherently rebuild their homes, often within 10 days. He added, however, that eviction is the only solution that exists at this time.
“Right now, the only effective remedy is periodic nest removal,” he said. “We are at our wits’ end to find a surefire method to remove them and make sure they don’t return.”
Public Service Electric and Gas has a policy of removing all nests that appear on its transformers.
“It really becomes a fire hazard, which can cause damage to our electrical facilities, which can cause outages,” Ms. Johnson said. “These nests do not belong on our electrical equipment.”
Officials of the utility have said, however, that they will continue working with the town of Edgewater and Ms. Evans-Fragale to protect any young birds or eggs found in the nests upon removal.
“If I’m really lucky, I’ll be able to negotiate something to make sure they’re safe,” Ms. Evans-Fragale said.
No one knows for sure how monk parakeets reached the wild, but tens of thousands of them were shipped from Argentina, where they were considered an agricultural pest, to the United States and Canada during the height of the pet trade in the 1960s and 1970s.
They then escaped from zoos, pet stores, or homes. One prevalent theory involves the overturning of a parakeet filled crate at John F. Kennedy airport in the late 1960s. Also, monk parakeets are very noisy, and that, Mr. Baldwin said, may have led fed-up pet-owners to release many of the birds.
“They’re loud, they’re noisy, they’re not … songbirds,” Mr. Baldwin said.
Mr. Baldwin, who does Internet work for the book-publishing company Allworth Press, became involved with monk parakeets this winter after protesting the removal of the nest of Pale Male and Lola. By April he was running a free tour of the Brooklyn College parakeets every week, leading small groups through the campus quad to the soccer field, with its six huge nests holding at least 12 birds apiece. He finishes the tour on Avenue I, where another five or six nests rest on utility poles between 26th and 28th streets.
Mr. Baldwin also started a Web site, brooklynparrots.com, where he posts his pictures and sells “Support Your Local Invasive Species” T-shirts and bumper stickers.
“I find the birds fascinating,” he said, “but I acknowledge they cause some problems.”