Video Clip: Wild Quaker Parrots in the Snow!

During the past week, New York was blitzed by a ferocious winter snowstorm, followed by several days of beak-chilling wind gusts that brought windchills down to sub-zero zones.

Before the wild parrots of Brooklyn entered my life, I would never have dared spend more than a few minutes exposed to this arctic cold. But today such weather fills me with an irresistable urge to go out and check up on my wild green pals. How are they faring in this brutal weather? How does winter modify their behavior? Do they become desperate when snow and ice covers their ordinary foraging grounds? Do they give up nest-building to simply hunker down in their high-rise "happy huts?"

This past weekend, dressed in six layers of clothing and armed with eight pounds of bird seed and a video camera, I sought to capture the wintertime antics of these hardy avian invaders, and have completed the first of two short video segments.

I hope you enjoy the strange sight of these remarkable urban parrots as they clamber over frosty snowdrifts to get a tasty, human-supplied meal - I froze my tail off shooting this clip!



This clip, like just about every clip we upload, will be making its way into the forthcoming Brooklyn Parrots documentary film.