A riot of parakeets
“By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?”
That’s a line from the narrator of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Now, I’m not sure about emus, but did you know that there are parakeets in London?
I can’t remember exactly when I first saw a parakeet here, but it would have been within the last six years, as I spotted them at this very house. I was sitting in the garden, when I looked up and there they were, a group of ten or fifteen parakeets, camouflaged between the leaves of a tree, screeching like mad. I’m not one to care for birds and hadn’t paid attention to their bickering, which I had attributed to a bunch of magpies or ravens; but no, it turns out they were parakeets, and this was quite a shock. If you’ve never seen a parakeet, they are these fluorescent green birds, bigger than a canary but smaller than a pigeon; like all birds, they have wings, claws, and those weird little lifeless eyes stuck each side of the head, which, when they stare, make them seem like they are sussing you out. They are social animals and hang out in groups. Regarding this latter point: there is no widely accepted term for a group of them — say, like a murder of crows — but since I am a poet at heart, I like to use a riot of parakeets.
Since my first sighting I spot them all the time, everywhere. And if at first they struck me as an eccentricity in this part of the world, eventually they stopped amusing me. Now they are firmly lodged in my personal catalogue of the city’s fauna, along with foxes, Canada geese, Egyptian ducks, swans (royal and plebeian), squirrels, rats, owls, and other more site-specific creatures like the water rats of New River Walk, the crows of the Tower of London, the eels of the East End, the deer of Richmond, the crocodiles of Hackney Marshes, and the turtles of Clissold Park.
Still, if I take a second to truly think about them, they are indeed odd. Aren’t they? How the hell did they end up here? Well, it turns out there are several theories.