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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: March 2006
Crows & parrots outwit
exterminators
(Marc Johnson)
DARIEN (Ct.), SAN FRANCISCO ––Crows and parrots, believed to represent the apex of avian intelligence, evolved in an environment favoring agility and efficiency in the lightest possible package.
Any air war strategist could therefore predict the outcome in conflict between the bird brains and exterminators with thoughts of lead.
Foes of crows with shotguns, fireworks, lasers, and recorded distress calls took the most murderous toll on crows they could during the winter of 2005-2006, on battlefields from upstate New York and the Philadelphia suburbs to the Rocky Mountains.
Most of the crows, however, are still there, or at least not very far away.
Attempted parrot purges have been no more successful, even though the entire U.S. wild parrot population is believed to be probably about 20,000, not more than 50,000 by the highest serious estimates. About 7,000 parrots, mostly monk parakeets and conures, live in California, with at least 2,000 monk parakeets in Florida.
USDA Wildlife Services claimed in January that a week of nonlethal hazing had driven all but 500 crows out of Auburn, New York, where as many as 33,000 congregated a few weeks earlier. Complaints about crows meanwhile erupted in Syracuse, Marcellus, Cazenovia, and Cortland, noted Syracuse Post-Standard staff writer John Stith.
Then the 60 participants in the third annual crow-killing contest organized by Lance Gummerson of Auburn, Tom Lennox of Owasco, and Jon VanNest of Moravia shot 462 crows in the countryside near Auburn during just two days, February 11-12. Yet most of the crows who were there reportedly escaped the gunners. The official crow count in Auburn increased to 600.
Crows can be rousted––but if the habitat attracts them, they come right back when the perceived threat subsides. Auburn reportedly drew 63,000 more crows at peak this winter, and still had 5,000 more when the killing contest started than were there a year earlier.
A similar story of frustration came from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in late January, where an estimated 50,000 crows for two nights feasted on unpoisoned bait put out by USDA Wildlife Services. The third night, Wildlife Services used poisoned bait.
The crows “moved over a block and sat down and didn’t want to come over,” state USDA Wildlife Services director Harris Glass told Associated Press.
The Wabash Valley Audubon Society has tried for at least five years to disperse huge “murders” of crows, as flocks are formally called, in Logansport and Terre Haut, Indiana. The Wabashers found that noise worked best, but “All the noise does is move them from one location to another,” Wabash Valley Audubon Society president John Haag admitted to Associated Press.
Apparently heedless of the failures of crow-shooting and noisemaking elsewhere, Riverton, Wyoming mayor John Vincent declared a public emergency in early February 2006 and ordered town police to shoot crows. As of February 12, they had killed about 800 to no visible effect.
Shaking fists toward the skies, crow-fighters soldier on like medieval crusaders, whose every move was signaled by black clouds of carrion-pickers. Starving crusaders at times ate crow, as farmers fled ahead of them, taking their livestock, but crows undoubtedly ate crusaders much more often.
The clank of armor in the Middle Eastern desert heat meant to the crows more or less what the sound of a can opener does to a dog or cat.
Foes of crows, re-outfitted as purgers of parrots, are also among public service agencies’ first line of defense against avian invaders from South America. Colonizing the greater New York City area and parts of Texas and Florida more than 40 years ago, at least 10 parrot species are now taking advantage of climatic warming to rapidly extend their range. A fossilized beak found in Montana indicates that parrots were in upper North American once before––but as contemporaries of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Personnel from USDA Wildlife Services, state wildlife agencies, and private exterminating companies routinely tear down the birds’ homes or blast them apart with water cannon, trying to protect electrical wiring.
The most prolific feral parrot species, monk parakeets, also known as Quaker parrots, are nonetheless as diligent as any human monks and intrepid as Quaker missionaries, often rebuilding stick nests that weigh more than a ton within a matter of days. Other feral parrots tend to be less obvious, but not less persistent.
Crows vs. parrots
Losing on all fronts to bird brains, most of the alleged expert crow and parrot expurgators appear to be unaware that in nature these two orders seldom co-exist––and not just because parrots are primarily Southern Hemisphere birds, while crows colonized much of the world from the north.
“Members of the crow family are found in South America,” Lives of North American Birds author Kenn Kaufman told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “but members of the genus Corvus, the true crows and ravens, are not found there. The common raven extends halfway down Central America, but the southernmost crows on this land mass are in Mexico. Thinking about places I know about in the tropics ,” Kaufman continued, “jays are generally not common in South America, the jaylike things in forests of southern Asia are mostly uncommon, and the crows and ravens found in Africa and southern Asia are very much out in the open country, not overlapping much with parrots, which tend to be tied to the forests.”
Indian house crows and ringnecked parakeets share the same cities. Yet as their name indicates, house crows did not become the prolific species they are today until human development enabled them to thrive in a deforested niche that was less hospitable to parrots, who retain an urban habitat niche at only a fraction of their rural abundance.
Parrots, chiefly vegetarians, have the edge over crows in a fruit-filled jungle. Crows, chiefly insectivores, do better as the jungle gives way to grasslands and conifers.
“I don’t know if the omnivore versus herbivore dichotomy is the reason why these groups don’t overlap much,” Kaufman said, “but it is a stimulating question.”
Where parrots thrive, crows and their jay cousins seem to take a hint that the habitat will not support them.
Where corvids predominate, Psittacidae seldom settle, not least because crows and jays are voracious nest-raiders, while most parrots and parakeets produce just two eggs per nest each year.
Accordingly, leaving either crows or parrots alone might be the best way to deter the other.
For example, crows roosting on the wires may prove to be the most certain means of keeping monk parakeets and conures out of power pole transformer platforms. About once a year conflicts between power companies and parrots burst into headlines, especially in Florida and Connecticut.
Confrontations between Florida Power & Light and parrot defenders appear to have peaked in 1999-2000. In August 2000 the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida unsuccessfully sought to bring cruelty charges against FPL workers who killed baby parakeets by blasting them out of their nests with hoses. FPL eventually issued a statement of regret, and began working with the Quaker Parrot Society to keep the parakeets from nesting on power poles.
The most recent of many Connecticut parrot wars erupted in October 2005. United Illuminating workers dismantled many nests, while USDA Wildlife Services dispatched captured occupants in a carbon dioxide gas chamber.
Parrot defender Julie Cook, 37, of West Haven, was arrested for breach-of-peace for refusing to leave the scene of a nest removal. The charge was later dropped.
“The electric utility relented after 179 birds were killed, among a statewide population estimated at more than 1,000,” summarized Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post. “In all, 103 nests from West Haven to Bridgeport were destroyed in United Illuminating’s $125,000 eradication program.”
“That’s $698.32 per dead parrot in costs to taxpayers or rate-payers,” commented Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral.
On December 6, 2005, FoA withdrew an application for an emergency injunction to save the parrots, after United Illuminating said it had finished parrot captures for the year. FoA is hoping, however, to make the suspension of parrot-killing permanent with a lawsuit alleging that United Illuminating has been negligent in trying to keep monk parakeets off off power poles, and should not now be allowed to kill the birds when non-lethal methods have barely been tried.
United Illuminating spokesperson Albert Carbone said that the nest dismantling teams “ found that a lot of the insulation on the wires was chewed up, which was a fire hazard and a threat to public health and safety.”
Carbone claimed that parrot nests have caused two utility pole fires since 2003.
But that raised the question of why United Illuminating didn’t clear the nests away long before they became parakeet apartment houses, holding as many as 40 birds each. Consolidated Edison in Brooklyn and Public Service Electric & Gas Company, in New Jersey, have reportedly both turned to nonlethal preventive measures, after more aggressive efforts against monk parakeets failed years ago.
“It’s not our policy to call them pests,” Consolidated Edison spokesperson Chris Olert told Verna Dobnik of Associated Press in 2001.
Connecticut Light & Power, the other major electrical utility serving Connecticut, has reportedly had to demolish only one nest, in 2003.
FoA has recommended non-lethal monk parakeet solutions for more than 15 years. A 2001 confrontation between FoA and the city of Stamford over monk parakeets ended when federally protected ospreys built nests atop monk parakeet nests at some sites. Earlier, Stamford tried covering power poles with netting to keep monk parakeets away. The parakeets quickly shredded the netting.
As in the past, monk parakeets surviving the utility company offensive almost immediately rebuilt their nests. But this time many rebuilt on 20-foot nest poles designed by Marc Johnson, of Feral Parrots Ltd. in Rockland, Massachusetts. As of late January 2006, Johnson had installed 23 nest poles with eight more planned.
“We have to get United Illuminating to do really aggressive maintenance throughout the spring and into the summer, particularly during the breeding season, so the birds aren’t allowed to build even a small nest [on power poles],” Johnson told Dixon.
“These are very smart birds,” Humane Society of the U.S. urban wildlife director Laura Simon told Pat Eaton-Robb of Associated Press. “If you harass them correctly at the right time of year, they will learn not to build on the electrical poles.”
Connecticut Legislative Environ-ment Committee co-chair Richard Roy (D-Milford) pledged to review a 2003 state law that identifies monk parakeets as an eradicable feral species, and said he had asked the state Congressional Representatives to try to remove monk parakeets from federal hit lists. “I’ve had over 50 calls about this,” Roy told Eaton-Robb, “and only one person has been on the side of United Illuminating.”
The Connecticut Audubon Society favored the nest removals, consistent with Audubon opposition to any non-native wildlife, but society senior director of science and conservation Milan Bull had good words for the parakeets. “They’re great birds,” Bull told Dixon of the Connecticut Post. “In South America,” where they are native, “they are considered an agricultural pest,” Bull noted, but added, “I have not noticed any situation, beyond a peripheral level, where monk parakeets have competed with native birds.”
Monitoring the Connecticut parrot population for decades, Bull told New York Times reporter Lennie Grimaldi in September 1990 that they may be descendants of a wild-caught flock who were crated and flown north from Argentina to be sold in pet stores circa 1968, during a brief parrot import boom. More than 64,000 monk parakeets were imported from 1968 to 1972––and, as escapees turned up all over the U.S., 11 states enacted monk parakeet bans which have largely been ignored, especially by the birds.
One particular crate full of monk parakeets reputedly bounced off a truck either at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, or along Interstate 95 near the T.F. Green State Airport in Rhode Island, according to different versions of the same story related by Bull and Rhode Island animal advocate Kathleen A. Lemery. Or possibly similar accidents happened twice.
Whatever occurred, monk parakeets were first recorded in Connecticut by the annual Audubon Christmas bird counts in 1971. At about the same time small flocks were seen in Warwick, Rhode Island, and on Long Island, directly across Long Island Sound.
The first Connecticut colony, settling in New Haven, spread south to Bridge-port circa 1990. The Warwick colony colonized Jamestown, Rhode Island, in 1997. The Long Island colony apparently moved to New Jersey circa 1993.
“They may not be trouble now,“ New Jersey Division of Fish & Game zoologist Paul Zalka warned in 1997, “but once they spread, they’ll create havoc.”
Agreed New Jersey Audubon Society conservation director Rich Kane, “These parrots will wreak havoc.”
But the New Jersey parakeets didn’t wreak havoc until after the Public Service Electric & Gas Co. twice destroyed their nests. Twice the parakeets rebuilt. Finally, in June 1998, parakeet nesting activity caused an early morning short circuit on a pole in Edgewater. Six fledglings were killed, despite the efforts of six adult parrots to save them, witnessed and described to Bergen Record staff writer Richard Cowen by Edgewater firefighter Bill Schiess.
Southern Connecticut State University biology department chair Dwight Smith recalled during the 2005 attempted parrot purge that earlier extermination efforts using similar methods failed. Flocks were netted alive at least twice, and were sent to live at the Beardsley Park Zoo in Bridgeport and the Long Island Game Farm, but the remnant populations left at large soon recovered.
“There has been an incredible outpouring of support for these animals, and we need to work with the USDA, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection and United Illuminating Co. to find another viable approach,” said Representative Christopher Shays (R-Bridgeport).
However, changing the relevant federal policies might require legislation which at present might have little change of passage.
Many species of parrot are recognized by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species as either endangered or threatened in the wild, but CITES protects species only in global commerce.
A USDA budget appropriation rider slipped through Congress just before Thanksgiving 2004 by U.S. Representative Wayne Gilchrest (R-Maryland) and U.S. Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) broadly exempted “non-native” species from the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Though the amendments were aimed at enabling government agencies to exterminate mute swans and non-migratory Canada geese, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service took the opportunity to exempt more than 100 species altogether, and wrote the enforcement regulations in an open-ended manner that allows for exempting more species later.
The entire parrot family, Psittacidae, is exempted from Migratory Bird Treaty Act protection, according to the USDA list of targeted species.
Welcomed in Chicago
Despite federal and Audubon antipathy, monk parakeets have long been officially tolerated and even encouraged in the Hyde Park district of Chicago, beginning during the mayoral tenure of the late Harold Washington. When an ash tree in Harold Washington Park that had supported as many as 50 monk parakeet nests split and fell in June 2004, the Chicago Police Department, Chicago Park District, and Chicago Animal Control all helped to rescue and relocate the nests to other trees in the park.
USDA Animal Damage Control, as Wildlife Services was formerly called, in 1988 ordered that the parrots should be evicted. The Harold Washington Memorial Parakeet Defense Fund successfully resisted the order.
The Chicago monk parakeets expanded their habitat from six known nesting sites in 1998 to 43 in 2004, according to Chicago printing company executive Walter Marcisz, who has documented their activity for the journal Meadowlark. Monk parakeets reportedly range from the Shedd Aquarium, alongside Lake Michigan, out to Carol Stream, Kenosha, and semi-rural suburbs in DuPage and McHenry counties, tending to follow berry thickets. Contrary to USDA expectations, however, they so far show no signs of spreading on into the Illinois grain belt.
There is not much fruit in a corn field––and that’s where the crows are.
Neither have monk parakeets spread beyond Houston, where their presence was documented by 1984; the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with local colonies since 1987; and Oklahoma City, where they were found in 1990. Where backyard fruit trees thrive, monk parakeets thrive. The land beyond the watered suburbs, they leave to the crows.
Along the west coast, monk parakeets are thriving as far north as Seattle and Port Orchard, Washington. In April 2005 the Port Orchard city council required Cingular Wireless to trap a feral flock of about 30 as a condition of winning a permit to nearly double the height of a cell telephone relay tower.
The Port Orchard parakeets are believed to be descended from five who escaped in early 2002 from a dropped crate at Phase II Birds, in the South Kitsap Mall. A red-headed conure who escaped from a home in South Kitsap may fly with them.
At least six parrot species have colonized California. The oldest continuously observed populations, in the San Gabriel Valley, may have been started by escapees from a 1959 pet shop fire in Pasadena.
As many as 1,500 parrots thrive in Temple City, California. Bakersfield, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, and Riverside also have established populations of various species, mostly conures and monk parakeets, but also including black-hooded parakeets and others.
The San Francisco conures are especially well-known, documented in a recent book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, by musician Mark Bittner, and in a film by the same name made by Bittner’s partner Judy Irving. Bittner has advocated often for the parrots and their habitat in a series of public controversies going back almost a decade.
Conure flocks have also been controversial in Colorado Springs and Maui, Hawaii
Peach-faced lovebirds, an African species, circa 1989-1990 nested near Mesa and Apache Junction, Arizona. By 2004 they ranged throughout Phoenix and Scottsdale.
Contrary to general impression, there are parrots who are native to parts of the U.S., other than the Carolina parakeet, officially extinct since 1930.
Thick-billed parrots range into Arizona at times from Mexico. A few dozen may nest in Arizona. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service tried from 1983 to 1995 to expand the thick-billed parrot population, releasing 88 birds who were confiscated from smugglers. Disease, drought, and predation soon killed at least 43 of them. The rest vanished––but thick-billed parrot sightings are still occasionally reported, including a large flock observed at Copper Canyon, Arizona, in 2005.
Red-crowned parrots, green parakeets, red-lored parrots, yellow-headed parrots, and lilac-crowned parrots, also native to Mexico, have within the past six years formed colonies in the Rio Grande Valley.
While the others probably are descended from birds who escaped from smugglers, the red-crowned parrots may have migrated north from nesting colonies known to have existed along the Rio Conchos, 183 miles south of Harlingen, Texas.
In any event, parrots have escaped from smugglers for decades. Only relatively recently have they found the North American habitat congenial. ––Merritt Clifton