New residents on our street

Earlier this summer I was outside working in the yard and heard an odd bird call, one that I thought I recognized but hadn’t expected to hear.  The call was repeated for ten to fifteen minutes, as though several of them were talking together, and finally stopped.

I kept hearing them, though, and finally one day last month I saw them:  a pair of Quaker parrots (also known as monk parakeets).  Their distinctive gray fronts and blue wingtips make identification easy, and I also knew there are several known colonies of feral Quakers in Austin, one of which is perhaps a dozen blocks from our house.  Quakers are a common and popular pet parrot, and the Austin colony is thought to descend from a group of pets released at Town Lake almost twenty years ago.  I don’t yet know whether these have set up a new nest somewhere nearby.  I’ll have to keep an eye out, although an established Quaker nest isn’t hard to spot.  They build enormous nests of woven twigs, preferring power poles and light standards that give them an established framework to build from.

Trying to capture feral Quakers is strongly discouraged because their habit of nesting in power lines gives them a very effective “electric fence.”  I wouldn’t want to capture one in any case, because they’re very much one-person birds, to the point of defending “their” person from everyone else in the house.  I’m just as happy they should live in the neighborhood, taking baths in nearby puddles.  (A leaking municipal water valve in the middle of the street was favorite until this week, when the city water department came by and fixed it.)  They talk to each other, but don’t screech as the two pet green parakeets my grandmother kept used to do.  In all, I could have (and have had) lots worse neighbors than these.

Billy Carter debited the Highland stapler.  Fnord.