The Dewdrop World

Parrots of Pasadena

Unlike the peacocks, it isn’t clear how Pasadena got these huge flocks of peacocks, though. Some say it happened when a pet store caught fire and the animals got lose.

Parrots and peacocks on the loose?

Others think they just ended up in the area—flown off course? Like the red-whiskered bulbuls, they are newcomers whose story is not known.

Article on Parrots in Pasadena

In Southern California, there are at least 11 species of wild parrots inhabiting at least 35 cities (see below). Ten of those species came from the jungles of Latin America, one came from India/North Africa. None came from Australia or New Zealand, which also have native parrots. All came to SoCal via the imported pet trade.

Naturalized Parrots of Southern California
Rose-ringed Parakeet (Conures) from tropical Africa and India

Lilac Crowned Parrot (Amazons) from the Pacific Coast of Mexico (vulnerable)

Red Crowned Parrot from NE Mexico (endangered)

Yellow Headed Parrot from southern Mexico down to Honduras (endangered)

Red Lored Parrot from the Caribbean Coast in southern Mexico down to Nicaragua

Red Masked Parakeet from Ecuador and Peru

Mitred Parakeet from Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina

Blue Crowned Parakeet from eastern Colombia all the way south to Argentina

Yellow Chevroned Parakeet from countries south of the Amazon River Basin

Nanday Parakeet from central South America

Blue (Turquoise) Fronted Parrot from central South America

Monk Parakeet from the Amazon Forest in east and central South America—also known as the Grey-headed or Quaker parakeet in the United States.

There is a theory that parrots migrated to Southern California from the jungles of Mexico, but that is likely false. Most parrots migrate only short distances to take advantage of weather changes in their native lands.

However, there are at least four plausible theories that do explain how the wild parrot population started in Southern California:

There are verified reports of small bird traders in the 1940s and '50s who had accidents en route and let their wild-caught, caged parrots free without meaning to.

In 1959, parrots were released from Simpson's Garden Town Nursery on the east side of Pasadena when it caught fire. Rather than watch 65–70 birds in the pet shop burn up, an injured employee, with the help of firefighters, freed as many as he could.

In the San Fernando Valley, parrots are said to have been released in 1979 by Busch Gardens—an exotic tourist attraction theme park set up by Anheuser Busch to draw the public to their Van Nuys beer manufacturing facility. When the company moved its headquarters to a different location, they attempted to place their collection of birds in zoos and private homes, setting free those they were unable to place.

Most of California's pet parrots showed up during a time when importing parrots was still legal—approximately 41,550 in the early '80s, according to Long Beach's Press Telegram News (08/22/13). However, as some parrot species became endangered in their home countries, their importation became illegal, and smugglers are said to have released parrots to avoid being caught.

Parents of young parrots teach them how to forage. Because most of the adults imported to Southern California were captured from the wild before being transported, they already knew how to forage, or they would not have survived. Now they reproduce in the wild locally, eating fruits from tropical trees also imported, and increasing their flocks to more than 600 birds in some city suburbs. How are those sizes possible without displacing native birds in some way?

 

Babies getting bigger!

Of course, I stupidly did not write down any dates. But I think it has been about a month since I saw the nine babies. Now two or three mommy birds are keeping together with only about a dozen babies--now much larger. 

This below was taken about a month ago. Now they can fly and they have a beautiful set of feathers. 

 

Morning Alarm Clock

Who needs an alarm clock when you have peacocks?

Babies Learning to Fly

The Cuteness Attack babies from a few weeks ago have gotten so big--and now they are learning to fly!

Momma goes first and then one by one, the babes... I love their shadows.

 

 

Dork-Eye Junco

Dork-eye Junco
Sometimes described as attractive, or even “flashy”, this twerp is actually just another grey american sparrow. But this doesn’t stop it from flitting to and fro all over the forest floors, making its loud, painfully high-pitched trill, and scratching around for food with its feet.

The male’s song is a loud trill of the same note, repeated up to 23 times. It can last for several seconds and is irritating enough to be heard from hundreds of feet away.

Color: Boring. It’s got a white under-belly, as if anyone cares.

The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America

California Towhee (After a leisurely bird bath)

From Jenny Odell in the Believer:

The California towhee, a beige midsize sedan of a bird, does not have what we would ordinarily call a song. Instead, it emits a loud, periodic beeping that sounds like a smoke detector running low on batteries—a noise my dad refers to as a “chirp bomb.” You’ll hear it from below rather than above, since towhees like to forage through leaf litter, quickly jumping forward and back in search of bugs. My neighborhood in Oakland is full of this mix of dry rustling and beeping.

California towhees aren’t as simple as they seem. While they look to be colored a dull brown all over, closer inspection reveals a bit of orange streaking just below the beak and under the tail, prompting me to nickname them “secret orange-butts.” Their sound repertoire, too, is more complex than chirp bombs: very occasionally, I will hear one or more of them let out an agitated sound, descending in pitch, that I can compare only to someone using a squeaky marker on a whiteboard to draw tighter and tighter squiggles. This signals towhee drama, as far as I can tell, since it coincides with the birds chasing one another through the shrubbery.

Most of the time, though, the beeps are all you hear. Generic as this “song” may seem, it is actually quite geographically specific: the range of California towhees is restricted almost entirely to California and Baja California. And because they are present all year round, the steadiness of their chirps has begun to remind me less of a smoke detector and more of a clock marking local time.

The Perfumed Winds of May

First appeared in Riverteeth Journal on May 24, 2020

風薫る五月

In the Japanese taxonomy of breezes, the perfumed winds(風薫) blow just before the south-easterly winds of the rainy season, which arrive later in the month. Known as the plum rains (梅雨)—so heavy, the downpours are said to knock the ripening plums right off their branches. When that happens, it is the yellow sparrow wind (黄雀風) that is blowing. The ancient calendar is filled with times when one thing is transformed into another. In this case, Chinese legend has it that when this wind blows, the fish in the ocean turn into tiny sparrows.

Cleopatra knew all about winds. She traveled the Nile on a boat whose sails were perfumed in sandalwood and rose water. Adorned with purple sails so perfumed, Shakespeare said, the winds were love-sick with them.

In Los Angeles, May is the time of “peacocks screeching in the palm trees.” Their desperate longing can be heard for miles around. Still weeks away from “June Gloom,” when a heavy marine layer blankets the city in thick mist, in May the roses bake in the LA sun.

May is also marked by the flowering of the jacaranda trees. Strange that hardly anyone mentions them, since the world turns purple in May. That’s when I become Cleopatra for a few weeks, living in a cloud of purple perfumed blossoms.

Peony Parasols --Japan

 

Venus Rising

Christy Lee Rogers

The Baroque

Wonderland

New Work/Apple

Sparrows discover new feeder