I Love Parrots in the Springtime

(Okay, dead of winter. Work with me here.)

I started noticing them a couple of years ago, in the park across the street from my office. Late afternoon they would come in and start making a tremendous racket, audible from 20-odd floors up, sounding like chattering monkeys. I suppose that must be what we sound like to them.

I had known about them for decades, knew there were flocks of wild parrots in San Francisco. But here's the thing: knowing is not the same thing as believing. You walk through the park and hear them chattering and know they're parrots but there's always a part of you that keeps saying they can't be parrots, it just seems so improbable, this isn't some South Seas island. Or, y'know, wherever parrots come from. And you start to give in to your doubts. Must be some normal birds, something less exotic, less hallucinatory. I don't know, magpies or something.

Then they take off, and you see a brief flash of green against the sky, just for a fraction of a second. Yup...those are parrots all right.

But it was so brief a glimpse that soon you start to wonder again...


I had never seen them close-up before yesterday. Brady (pictured above), from the Guess Where in San Francisco Flickr group, posted a message to the group inviting us to join her in the park yesterday to feed parrots. So I snuck out of work for 15 minutes to check out the scene.


And scene it was. A half dozen GWSFers (more showed up after I left), and dozens of parrots competing for the bits of apple and nuts and seeds they had brought. Parrots up close and personal. Parrots as fashion accessories.

I still think they're improbable, but I suppose I'm convinced of their existence on more than just a rational level. And I'm glad they're real, because they make San Francisco just a little more surreal.


I almost felt sorry for the pigeons underfoot. I wonder if they knew they just weren't pretty enough to feed.

[That's all, folks]