Parrots, Parrots Everywhere

In the comments section of my previous post about the deer, Oh Deer, Oh Deer!!, I mentioned that I would post a photo of the green parrots that used to visit us in Santa Ana, CA. I know that I took a million pictures of them but I can't find a one. I pulled this one off the web and it'll have to do.

The green parrots are one of the unique things about Santa Ana. A large flock lives in the city...there's even a restaurant named after them. There are conflicting stories about how they came to be in the area. One story says that smugglers released them rather than be caught; another that they were part of a Disneyland event way back when and escaped.

Side note here: We lived so close to Disneyland that we heard the fireworks every night at 9:30 during the summer. A shout out here to my friends and former next door neighbors Mary and Oscar who still crack up about my slurring pronouncement of "Dinnylan" during the booms one night. We were at a neighborhood wine tasting party and we'd all had a few. I always teased Mary that we were going to find her in the gutter the next morning. :)

Okay, back to the birds. Depending on the time of year, the parrot's food sources would change, and that would dictate where they'd spend their time. Our street was lined with carob trees that grew long 9" pods full of carob beans so we saw them most often in the spring. The parrots would spend a lot of time in the tree in front of our house and always seemed to arrive about 5 o'clock in the afternoon for their dinner.

A couple of fun things about the parrots:

• They aren't skittish. You can walk around under the tree and, while they are paying attention to you, they don't seem to care.
• They are hard to see with their green feathers serving as wonderful camoflage. Even when you are right underneath them they are still difficult to distinguish.
• They eat like pigs with poor manners. They chomp, chomp, chomp on the beans and all the rubbish just falls down out of the tree. There were a couple of times that I didn't know they were there until stuff started falling on me while I was in the yard weeding.
• They don't sing...they squawk...and it wasn't unusual to hear a flock go overhead very early in the morning while lying in bed.
• They are playful and amusing, hanging upside-down on the telephone wires behind the house.
• They are monogamous, and even though they often fly in flocks, you can always see them separated into pairs within the larger group.

A couple of years ago, there was a movie called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill that followed a similar flock of red parrots on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Very touching.