Sometimes the stars do align properlyin the sky. This morning I had a meeting up north. I decided well in advance to avoid traffic, leave home early and bird somewhere along the coast north of Tel Aviv metropolin. Yesterday evening, mega news broke of the first Buff-breasted Sandpiper for Israel, found by Gal Sherbelis, exactly […]
Tag: Monk Parakeet
Big City Parrots
My daughter Katie lives in Brooklyn, and I love when I get to visit her. Not only is she a wonderful person in her own right, but also when I’m at her place, I get to eat real New York bagels and see cool urban birds. My favorite is the Monk Parakeet. I often hear […]
Bronzed Cowbirds in La Carreta Parking Lot, 12/27/2015
After finding our Burrowing Owls, we drove down to Miami-Dade County and stopped at a La Carreta Cuban Restaurant. We didn’t go for the food, though I would have loved to have tried the food there (I love Cuban food). We went to find cowbirds in the parking lot. It wasn’t long before we started […]
Happy New Year!
My creature of the year award for 2015 goes to the neighborhood favorites — Brooklyn’s monk parakeets! The monk parakeet, Myiopsitta monachus, is also called Quaker parrot or parakeet and a few other names. There are colonies of them in Queens and Manhattan and elsewhere in New York City, but my favorite flock lives in […]
Bolivia’s domestic parrots seen as “crop pests”
A new shipment of illegally trafficked parrots arrives at the Los Pozos market in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. The sellers and middlemen are approached and questioned. The species, age and place of capture are noted down. This isn’t an enforcement sting, far from it; it’s research. The year was 2004, and scientists were […]
Parakeets
I stopped by Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn this week to visit the locally famous parakeets. This group flew over and landed by me, sat and squawked for a while, and then flew deeper into the cemetery. Monk parakeets have been around Brooklyn for about forty years; the colony at Green-Wood is one of the largest […]
POLL: Should the Monk Parakeet be eradicated in the UK?
It has taken nets propelled by bungee cords, egg stealing and £260,000, but the days of the monk parakeet in the UK are now numbered. A programme to eradicate the colourful but non-native bird that started in 2011 has brought the population down to the last 50 birds, according to the latest government estimate. How […]
Monk Parakeet
About a week ago I found some Monk Parakeets at an electrical substation near my home. This is one of those birds I thought I’d never see in Seminole Co, but I saw about 15 here a couple weeks ago, and then 25 of them this morning in the same location. I spoke to someone […]