Strange Tales of Avian Invaders

About two weeks ago, I was telling a woman I met at a Manhattan cocktail party about the fact that there are wild parrots roaming over Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey, and she was genuinely horrified. "I certainly hope they're not spreading disease!" she said. "Do they attack people?"

I assured this woman that to my knowledge, wild parrots aren't any nastier than any other form of wildlife ordinarily found in urban areas of the U.S.A. I later found out that she had recently seen War of the Worlds, which may have caused her to view any invasions, even by extremely cute parrots, to be apocalyptic.

Still, there are enough myths about these parrots to float a boat, and they begin with the parrots' arrival here; what I call their Myth of Origin. In the last few weeks, I've heard the following stories about the Brooklyn parrots' arrival, each of which contains a dollop of truth and a dollop of nonsense:

1. They arrived when an Argentinean tramp steamer sunk in New York Harbor.
2. They escaped from a New York zoo aviary that collapsed in a blizzard.
3. A crate full of them fell off a truck back in 1998 that was transshipping them from Kennedy airport.
4. The hundreds of parrots now in Brooklyn are all related to a single mother and father.
5. They were blown here by Hurricane Gloria in the mid-1980s.

As I discussed in What Are Wild Parrots Doing in Brooklyn?, I believe that they came to Brooklyn in the late 1960's, because this incident has been widely quoted in the scientific literature about them, and I have received at least one direct report from a person who remembers seeing them at Brooklyn College in the early 1970's.

Still, while the Brooklyn Parrots' Myth of Origin may be reasonably settled, the more I study these birds, the more odd stories I run into. Yesterday, a guy in Midwood told me that on Ocean Avenue, there are wild parrots running rampant near 18th Street, but that they aren't Quaker Parrots at all. "They've mated with another kind of parrot," he said. "They're big and they're not green!" Last week, I ran into someone who insisted that the parrots' arrival in the New York Area was a sure sign of Global Warming. "There are going to be parrots at the North Pole in a few years," he said. "You can blame the Republicans for this one!"

Brooklyn is a borough that has always cherished its legends: Diamond Jim Brady, Steve Brodie, the "Sandhogs" who built the Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and lately, the Brooklyn Parrots. Truth, fiction, myth and legend are free to intermingle in this fecund borough, producing an offspring that is wonderfully myterious, like the birds themselves.

The wild parrots that now inhabit the U.S.A. are just beginning their odyssey here, and thanks to these stories, it is already a mythic one. Nobody knows how it really began, or how it is likely to end. But with so many myths, superstitions, and working fictions already in play, it is clear that these wild parrots will carry these mysteries with them in ever widening circles, shrugging off the cold hand of rational science as easily as they do a frigid Brooklyn morning in February.