The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill by Mark Bittner

Author:Mark Bittner [Bittner, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-42247-7
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

By late October, the flock was flying as a single group again. It was the time of year in which I got my cleanest flock counts. The usual pattern was that a few babies died soon after fledging, and then the population stabilized, staying the same size throughout the winter. That year, two of the seven babies (eight were born, one of which was Paco) died, which left the flock population at twenty-nine. At a feeding in November, I noticed that five birds were absent. That was nothing extraordinary. It often happened that a small group got left behind at the previous feeding stop and then had to catch up with the flock. But I always paid attention to who wasn’t there. A quick survey showed that the five missing birds were Sonny, Lucia, and their three surviving babies. Later, at a mid-afternoon feeding, Sonny and family were still gone. In the middle of the feeding, I spotted the five of them high up in the sky and zooming toward the garden. As they drew closer, I heard them announcing their arrival. The birds on the fire escape were getting edgy. Sonny’s family landed in the deodar cedar, and four parrots flew out from the fire escape to meet them. Sonny had been kicked out of the flock again. When the four sentinels reached the deodar, a big fight broke out. The six adult birds were locked together in a tight bunch, going for each other’s throats and eyes, screaming bloody murder. It was as intense as any dogfight. Sonny put up a strong defense, but he was overwhelmed. He and Lucia withdrew with their three babies.

I was keen to learn the identities of the enforcers. I expected that they would all be males, but upon their return to the fire escape I discovered that they were two couples: Scrapper and Scrapperella, and Henry and Mrs. Henry. I wasn’t surprised to see Henry in this group—he seemed commanding, especially since Eric’s death—but Scrapper’s presence did surprise me. He was a quiet and small bird who usually minded his own business. I’d read that all bird flocks have pecking orders, so I’d been eager to learn this flock’s. So far, though, I’d been unable to discern any hierarchy. If Scrapper was near the top, it was ironic given that he was literally henpecked. Scrapperella had plucked the area below his chin so many times that the feathers had stopped growing back. There were a lot of cases where a bird would do something that seemed to imply a strong standing, but it didn’t bear out in the long run. For instance, Sonny had been the one bird Oliver couldn’t intimidate, but it had done nothing to change Sonny’s standing within the flock. Sonny had flown with Eric over the summer—and if there’d ever been a top bird, it was Eric—but the other birds were unimpressed. Nor had I ever seen Eric function in a clear leadership role. He’d never decided when it was time for the flock to leave the fire escape; that was done entirely by consensus.

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