Yesterday morning I woke up in a hotel room near the JFK airport in New York. I was on the 12th floor, the top floor of the hotel. As I opened the curtains to let the morning light flood into the room, I looked out over the city scape and the airport. Then the most incredible thing happened.
From above and behind me, presumably from the roof of the hotel, a swarm of birds, maybe 30 or 40 in all, fluttered out and dove down and away from me. They were all large, green parrots with yellow beaks. I had to pinch myself to make sure it really happened.
I didn’t know parrots flocked.
I didn’t know there were wild parrots in America.
I didn’t know there were swarms of parrots in New York City in cold November.
But there they were.
Saul Bellow writes about parrots in Chicago, more than a decade ago:
“I recall that flocks of parrots had descended on a clump of trees that grew edible red berries. These parrots, thought to be the descendants of a pair of caged birds that had escaped, built their long sac-like nests in the lake-front park, and later colonized the alleys. In these bird tenements that hung from utility poles, hundreds of green parrots lived.”
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/parrots/parrots.html
http://www.brooklynparrots.com/