Published in Narratively
April 2017
Like counter-culture, conspiracy theories and anti-establishment populism, they started on the margins and colonised the centre. First they were seen in Kingston upon Thames, a leafy suburb situated on London’s southwestern fringe. Then they moved to neighbouring Richmond and squatted the gardens of Hampton Court Palace – former residence of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I – before migrating northwards into London proper. Soon they were in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, commuting down the Mall, clamouring around Big Ben, massing in Parliament Square. Then they were in the grand Victorian cemetery at Kensal Green. Then they were up Primrose Hill. Then they were crowding East London’s canals. Then they were everywhere.
In the ten years I have lived in London, its feral population of green parakeets (technically ring-necked parakeets or psittacula krameri manillensis) have gone from being an anomaly, an exotic curiosity in a couple of neighbourhoods south of the river, to becoming a ubiquitous sight over vast swathes of the city. I first saw them in Kensington Gardens on a grey and rainy day, after a friend and I clambered through damp undergrowth on a mission to discover their secret lair. There was a chorus of harsh calls, a fleeting flash of green, and we had the feeling that we’d sighted some rare and fabled beast. But once our eyes – and ears – had attuned, they appeared wherever we looked: not only in parks and cemeteries but swooping down terraced streets, enlivening London’s pigeon-grey with tropical bursts of colour. We started to see them near our homes. We saw them in our gardens. Intrigued, we began a series of excursions to locations across the city, armed with camera and dictaphone – we termed it ‘gonzo ornithology’ – to learn as much as we could about these avian arrivals.
In the process we ended up talking to people from all walks of life: park rangers, dog-walkers and joggers, gardeners, eccentrics, alcoholics, people who lived in million-pound mansions and on council estates, Polish gravediggers and Albanian icecream-sellers. Very quickly our recordings became less about parakeets, and more about ‘what people talk about when they talk about parakeets’. The seemingly neutral subject of these small green birds provided a starting point for extraordinary conversations. Londoners have a reputation for being hurried and unfriendly, and English people in particular are supposed to be incapable of anything other than small-talk. The parakeets disproved all that: once the subject had been broached it was remarkable how much people had to say, and how quickly they revealed their deepest thoughts and feelings.
Some people saw them as harbingers of climate change, thriving in England’s increasingly mild winters (no doubt this is partly true, but, as we learned from a genuine ornithologist we met by accident, they come from the Himalayan foothills, tolerating ice and snow as well as native British birds). Some younger people, who had grown up with them, assumed they were native British birds, accepting their presence as easily as that of ducks and pigeons. And inevitably – in the age of Brexit, tabloid hysteria and Europe’s refugee crisis – there were those who saw their spread as a metaphor for immigration. Some condemned them as invasive migrants, driving out indigenous birds and wreaking havoc on local ecosystems. Some went further: ‘There’s just something alien about them,’ said one man only half-jokingly, ‘I hope this becomes a propaganda broadcast to drive them out!’ But others admired them as underdogs thriving against all odds, canny adaptors who had exploited an ecological niche. It didn’t take long for one woman to tell us the story of her father’s family who fled Spain during the civil war, and had made London their home, ‘just as these birds are doing.’ And appearances could be deceptive. The man in the Union Jack t-shirt keeping vigil outside Kensington Palace, surrounded by tributes to Princess Diana – a royal obsessive who talked so rapidly it sounded as if he was on fast-forward – loved them almost as much as he loved the queen. ‘They’re living things, they’ve got the right to live in England, I don’t know where they’re originally from but I hope they don’t pack their bags and go, I’d miss them if they ever left here, they’re welcomed by me and by the Royal Parks, they’re welcome any time!’
Our quest became even weirder when we left politics behind and plunged into the murkier realm of parakeet origin myths. Amazingly, no-one knows where these brightest and most visible of London’s settlers actually came from, although there are numerous theories. The most commonly held belief is that they escaped from aviaries and bred spectacularly well, or that an entire flock was released from Shepperton film studios – just a few miles from Kingston upon Thames – during the filming of Katherine Hepburn’s The African Queen in 1951. (The film was actually shot ten miles northeast at Isleworth, but for some reason Shepperton has lodged in the public consciousness, adding another layer of mystery to the tale.) Our favourite story was that a breeding pair was released in 1968 on Carnaby Street by Jimi Hendrix in a stoned gesture of love, although the theory involving George Michael – that the singer’s bird collection escaped from cages in his Hampstead home during a botched burglary – came a close second. In the end, the truth doesn’t matter. The green parakeets are here, and the urban legends they inspire make London’s story richer.
Following these bright, plucky, resourceful and mysterious birds from north to south, east to west, revealed new facets of a city both of us thought we knew. We understood London not in terms of its grand buildings and monuments, or its boroughs or Underground zones, but by the parks, cemeteries, woodlands, rivers and canals that make the city, surprisingly, one of the greenest in Europe. Learning that the parakeets navigate by their own ‘flyways’ – commuting from one green space to another down the same streets every day, in squadrons consisting of dozens of birds squawking above the traffic – brought an entirely new dimension to London’s layered map. But most importantly, the parakeets unlocked the tongues of our fellow Londoners, granting us access to stories we’d never have heard otherwise. These small, exotic settlers from a land far away brought us closer to our city, and its people.