Hendrix? Hepburn? Study busts myths about origins of UK's parakeets | The Guardian

Their bright green feathers and unmistakable squawk make ring-necked parakeets a striking addition to British park wildlife, but the question of how the tropical birds were first introduced has been a subject of contention.

One urban legend traces their origin to a pair released by Jimi Hendrix on Carnaby Street in 1968; another suggests they arrived in 1951 when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn visited London with various animals in tow to film The African Queen, set in the equatorial swamps of east Africa.

Now the question has been subjected to a rigorous forensic analysis for the first time, in research that points to an entirely different explanation: pet owners around the country releasing the birds into the wild, possibly prompted by media coverage of fatal “parrot fever” outbreaks.

Steven Le Comber, who led the research at Queen Mary University London, said: “The ring-necked parakeet has become a successful invasive species in 34 countries on five continents. The fun legends relating to the origins of the UK’s parakeets are probably not going to go away any time soon.”

However, analysis by Le Comber and colleagues based on geographic profiling methods used to track down criminals concluded that Britain’s booming parakeet population has grown from numerous small-scale accidental and intentional pet releases.

The analysis tested other popular theories, including that parakeets kept at Syon Park in west London escaped in the 1970s when debris from a plane crashed through the aviary roof, or that damage to aviaries during the Great Storm of 1987 was responsible. However, none of the suspect sites showed up prominently in the heatmap of more than 5,000 unique records dating from 1968 to 2018.

The research, published in the Journal of Zoology, drew on sightings recorded in the National Biodiversity Network Atlas dating back to the 1960s. When this failed to produce an obvious hotspot of parrot activity, the researchers turned to newspaper archives, and a search turned up thousands of pages of news stories about parakeets written between 1804 and 2008.

Island Weirdness #25 -- The Broad-Billed Parrot

The dodo wasn’t the only unique bird to evolve on Mauritius. While about eight other endemic bird species still survive today, there were at least twice that many before the arrival of humans in the late 1500s -- including the broad-billed parrot Lophopsittacus mauritianus.

Also referred to as the “Indian raven” in historical accounts, it was a fairly large bird measuring between 45 and 65cm in length (1′6″-2′1″). Unusually for a parrot it had a high degree of sexual dimorphism, with males being significantly bigger than females.

Many images depict it as entirely black or blue-grey, but this seems to be based on a misinterpretation. More recent translations of old Dutch descriptions suggest it was actually much more colorful, with a red beak, blue head, and reddish body.

It had a proportionally big head and a flattened skull, and seems to have had a highly specialized diet, using its its large strong beak to crack open hard seeds and nuts like modern hyacinth macaws.

It was near-flightless, capable of taking to the air only with difficulty, and was said to be “bad-tempered”. Attempts to keep individuals in captivity failed, the birds refusing to eat, and while the wild population had apparently learned to be wary of humans by the late 1660s by that point it was already too late. Much like the dodos they lived alongside, a combination of deforestation, hunting, and predation by invasive mammal species sent them into extinction by the 1680s.

The great green expansion: how ring-necked parakeets took over London | The Guardian

If you ask random Londoners how parakeets came to thrive in their city – streaking in squadron-like formations through parks, down roads and along canals, following regular “flyways” as punctually as business commuters – the chances are that one of these theories will be told as fact. No one is ever sure where they heard it. They are classic urban myths, spreading through word of mouth, mutating and evolving a little with every teller. Whatever the truth, or lack of it, these stories are a sign that London’s parakeets, in their short time among us, have become deeply lodged in the city’s collective imagination.

Sadly, there is a more prosaic explanation. Small, charismatic and brilliantly coloured – though voiced with a horrendous squawk – parakeets have been popular as pets for hundreds of years. We have no idea how many arrived in Britain through London’s busy docks, or how many seized the first opportunity to escape, but dozens or hundreds of individuals must have gained freedom over the years, flocking together for protection and enthusiastically breeding.

Their success was limited at first. The earliest recorded sightings were in Dulwich in 1893 and Brixton in 1894. A breeding pair were reported in Epping Forest in 1930. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that the first large colony was established, roosting noisily in the trees by the river at Kingston-upon-Thames, where they became such a local feature that many people still know the birds as “Kingston parakeets”. For decades they were an exotic novelty, exclusive to south-west London.

Then, perhaps 10 years ago, began the great green expansion.

First they spread into Richmond and Kew. Then they crossed the Thames. They established themselves in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, and moved north into Highgate and Hampstead Heath, west into Holland Park and Notting Hill, and east along the Regent’s Canal into Hackney and Walthamstow Marshes. Almost overnight they appeared in places they’d never been in before, and quickly became almost as ubiquitous as pigeons. In the space of a few short years they spread to every borough and even beyond the M25, following in the path of generations of upwardly mobile Londoners by departing the grimy inner city for the Home Counties.