JOLLY DAYS

Parrots (updated)

On my run I often see a flock of wild parrots. Clamorous and colorful, I always wondered what the story was behind their presence in the city. Then I found out about...Mark Bittner, admirable man.

Mark:

In the spring of 1990 I saw something on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill that astonished me: wild parrots. I was so curious about their presence that I kept trying to get closer to them until finally I had them eating out of my hand. Thus began a friendship and study that continued until the late summer of 1999 when I had to move away from Telegraph Hill.

Mark invites reports of sightings of his flock. Here is mine (as posted on Mark's site):

Today (6/21/03) on our run, my wife and I saw, or rather heard, the call of a single parrot, intermittently, over a period of minutes. The call came from a tree just east of the community gardens near Philip Burton Park. From what ensued, I imagined the call must mean something like "gotta spot, c'mon over here, it's all clear!".

Moments later, pairs of parrots flew to that and adjacent trees, and so began an ongoing conversation that at first sounded contentious - I sometimes suspect the parrots get up cranky and it deteriorates from there - or perhaps, that clamor might be a reassurance of group presence.

This location is a frequent roost - today it must have been about a dozen - sometimes it appears thirty or so are in the group. The larger groups, when startled or inspired jointly, fly madly east, a chattering airborne tropical carnival.

Mark's photo of the day - with his beloved flockmates.

What? More on parrots?

There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data.

And...

Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."

Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it,"...

Birds images have have woven their way through my work over the years. This study, done on paper, is from a series called Hakinou (made up word):

And this recent painting, The Bird Who Sang At Night: