Winged friends in suburbia
THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL: Mark Bittner; Harmony Books, New York. $ 39.95.
SOMEWHERE TOWARDS the end of his fascinating tale of a flock of wild parrots in suburbia, Mark Bittner is overcome by the realisation that nature has a sweeping power over all man-made spaces. Given enough time, it can replace the dry and monotonous character of cities with the vibrant colours of natural life.
Bittner is the central figure in a very personal story of companionship, love, sharing and sacrifice that revolves round a group of exotic wild parrots in suburban San Francisco. Frisco the city is, to most people, a tribute to the zest for life, its cultures in confluence.
Arrival of wild parrots
For Bittner, however, the city of the Golden Gate Bridge really comes alive only when his winged friends arrive from Walton Square, breaking the silence of the morning with a burst of vibrant green in the sky. His favourite cherry headed and blue crowned conures or parrots, descending on Telegraph Hill, transform his dull and listless existence into a compelling and fantastic tryst with nature.
Bittner's story reads like a fairy tale, but it is very real. It was first made famous by newspapers and television shows before it became the book and film. His wild parrot companions are almost certainly escapees from the bird trade, tracing their origin to Peru, Argentina and Ecuador.
Turning point
With the arrival of the birds, Bittner, a failed musician, a lone, dissolute and homeless soul yearning to understand the meaning of life, is turned into a romantic for life.
He arrives in Telegraph Hill as the caretaker of a house running errands for the owner, but is mesmerised by the wild parrots that would change his life forever.
The cherry heads and the blue crowns are so clever and individualistic that he comes to recognise most of them, and gives them names such as Mandela, Chomsky, Dogen and Connor in his image of their likeness to real people. If one parrot reminds him of a musician, he calls it Paco, while a mafia-like personality earns another a name like Sonny. Of course, some parrots are more loveable than the others and Bittner has his own favourites.
The wild parrots of Telegraph Hill have twinkling eyes that communicate emotion to Bittner and they read his own feelings for them unerringly.
Over months and then years, his bowl of sunflower seeds on the fire escape of the house he tends becomes the centre of his universe, unfailingly attracting the flock each day for a sumptuous feed.
His periodic missions to rescue sick and injured members of the group inevitably cast him on a journey the kind of which few can hope to experience in their lifetime. There is joy, pain, violence and death in the parrot community and Bittner virtually becomes a part of it. Bird-watching is an all too familiar hobby, but Mark Bittner pursues it with intense feeling for his subjects.
A lifetime passion
He always reminds everyone that birds must be free in the wild and not in cages. True to his law, his first instinct is to nurse sick birds and set them free. This book that results from his studies of the conures provides a rare perspective on these intelligent and colourful parrots.
The account is all the more fascinating because these parakeets are a free-living flock of exotic birds, in perhaps the most incongruous of places in America — a crowded and big city. The book is as much memoir as behavioural study on species that are ruthlessly pursued for the wild bird market of the U.S. and elsewhere.
Wild-caught conures, which are listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) cannot be imported under U.S. law after 1993, Bittner explains, advancing the hypothesis that the flocks on Telegraph Hill and elsewhere in San Francisco are those that have managed to flee their smuggler-captors or owners and return to their wild ways in an alien land.
For birding enthusiasts
They must be left free to find their fortunes rather than be hounded on the ground that they are exotics and hence potentially dangerous to the endemic flora and fauna, he argues. One might take a sympathetic view, considering that the house sparrow, like many other plants and animals, has thrived in many countries as an introduced species.
The parrots, photographs of which are found in the book and on a companion website (www.wildparrotsbook.com) , make this delightful work compulsive reading, despite Bittner's occasional philosophical digressions into Dharma, Buddhism and communion with the natural world. His chapter on the "science of it" provides sufficient education for the birding enthusiast, while others would find his story to be simply extraordinary.
In the end, this account of a wild parrot flock is a reiteration of the simple joys that nature brings even to the inhospitable and often forbidding confines of a city. If the urban environment can make some space for trees, parks and lakes, it can convert dour concrete vistas into a colourful landscape.
G. ANANTHAKRISHNAN
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