Monk Parakeets Take Manhattan
I have been photographing the Monk Parakeet nest at 103rd and Amsterdam lately. Thanks to Bruce Yolton for telling me about it. Apparently (according to neighborhood residents) the parakeets have been building a nest under the A/C unit for about six weeks now.Although we had a short cold snap the continuing mild weather makes it much easier for the birds to build and maintain their nest. The parakeets also seem to enjoy the abundant fruits ripening on the trees in the Fredrick Douglass complex.
They also spend a lot of time breaking branches from the neighborhood trees to use in the nest. The photo at right shows one of the parakeets sharpening the end of a stick in preperation for inserting in the nest.
My gallery has quite a few photos of these guys as I find them quite photogenic.
This info is from the Wikepedia entry on Monk Parakeets. The entry on the last paragraph about Greenwood Cemetery is particularly interesting:
The Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus), also known as the Quaker Parrot, is aspecies of parrot that originated in the temperate areas of Argentina and Brazil in South America. It is the only member of the genus Myiopsitta.There are four subspecies:
* M. m. monachus, southeastern Brazil, Uruguay, and northeastern Argentina
* M. m. calita, western and southern Argentina
* M. m. cotorra, southeastern Bolivia, Paraguay, northern Argentina, and southern Brazil
* M. m. luchsi an isolated population in Bolivia which is smaller and may deserve species status.
This parrot is, on average, 29 cm longwith a 48 cm wingspan, and weighs 100 g. Females tend to be 10-20% smaller. It has bright green upperparts. The forehead and breast are pale grey and the rest of the underparts are very-light green to yellow. The flight feathers are dark blue, and the tail is long and tapering. The bill is orange. The call is a loud and throaty graaa or skveet. Domestic breeds have produced colors other than the natural plumage; these include white and blue in place of green.The Monk Parakeet is the only parrot that builds a stick nest, in a tree or on a man-made structure, rather than using a hole in a tree. This gregarious species often breeds colonially, building a single large nest with separate entrances for each pair. In the wild, the colonies can become quite large, with pairs occupying separate "apartments" in nests that can reach the size of a small automobile. Their 5-12 eggs hatch in about 24 days.
Unusually for a parrot, Monk Parakeet pairs occasionally have helper individuals, often a grown offspring, which assists with feeding the young (see kin selection).
Monk Parakeets are highly intelligent, social birds. Those kept as pets routinely develop large vocabularies.
The Monk Parakeet was brought to the United States in the late 1960s as a pet. Many escaped or were intentionally released, and populations were allowed to proliferate. By the early 1970s, it was established in seven states, and by 1995 it had spread to eight more. There are now thought to be approximately 100,000 in Florida alone.
As one of the few temperate-zone parrots, the Monk Parakeet is more able than most to survive cold climates, and colonies exist as far north as New York City, Chicago and communities in coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut. This hardiness makes this species second only to the Rose-ringed Parakeet amongst parrots as a
successful introduced species.The lifespan of Monk Parakeets has been quoted to be from 15-20 years, to 25-30 years.
In Argentina and Uruguay, Monk Parakeets are regarded as major agricultural pests (as Charles Darwin noted). In areas where they have been introduced, some fear that they will harm crops and native species. Evidence of the harm of these birds in introduced areas is disputed, and many people oppose killing a charismatic bird, but there have been local bans and eradication programs in some areas of the USA. Because of its invasive species status, a number of states outlaw either importation, sale, release , or mere possession of a monk parakeet.
Self-sustaining feral populations have been recorded in Europe, Israel, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands and Japan. Outside the USA, introduced populations do not appear to raise similar controversy, presumably because of smaller numbers of birds.
In addition they have found a home within Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York after an accidental release decades ago. While the grounds crew initially tried to destroy the unsightly nests at the entrance gate, they no longer do so, because the presence of the parrots has reduced the number of pigeons nesting within it. The management's decision was based on a comparative chemical analysis of pigeon faeces (which destroy brownstone structures) and Monk Parakeet faeces (which have no ill effect). Oddly then, the Monk Parakeets are in effect preserving this historic structure.
I found this info on the "Institute for Biological Invasions" Web site.
First recorded in New York in the late 1960s (Lever 1987, Long 1981), they became widespread in the northeast and New England states in the 1970s (Niedermeyer and Hickey 1977), but their range was dramatically reduced by the USFWS control efforts, according to CBC data from the early 1990s (Van Bael and Pruett-Jones 1996). Although they had been eradicated in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey (Smith 1988, as cited in Stevenson and Anderson 1994), CBC data from the 1990s reveals large, stable populations of monks in these areas (Van Bael and Pruett-Jones 1996). Monks were first observed to the north in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1980, representing the northernmost known population of monks, and may have taken hold (Gauthier and Aubrey 1996, Spreyer and Bucher 1998).Although monks reached and colonized numerous locations in midwest and middle Atlantic states (Neidermeyer and Hickey 1977, Long 1981), most of these populations did not exist by 1995 (Van Bael and Pruett-Jones 1996). The best studied population occurs in Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois (Hyman and Pruett-Jones 1995, South and Pruett-Jones 2000). In April 1992, Hyman and Pruett-Jones (1995) counted 64 birds and a total of 26 nests on power poles and one antenna tower in Hyde Park, a suburb west of Chicago. After the nestlings fledged in July, they counted a total of 143 birds, and in the spring of 1993, counted a total of 95 birds in the same area (Hyman and Pruett-Jones 1995). The birds foraged on plant buds, weeds, fruits and berries of ornamental plants when available, but fed exclusively on commercial bird seed at bird feeders during the coldest months. More recently, South and Pruett-Jones (2000) made over 1,400 individual foraging observations from 300 foraging groups in the Hyde Park population. The birds fed mainly on birdseed (over 25 % of their overall diet). The plant families Poaceae and Rosaceae were represented in over 10% of the foraging observations, but monks fed on 11 other families of plants as well. Seasonal differences in diets were dramatic, with flowers and buds comprising over 80% of their diet in spring, fruits comprising over 80% of their diet in summer, and seeds comprising 100% of their diet in winter. They formed feeding groups usually of less than five birds, and the largest flock observed was 31 birds.
