Spain’s parrot pandemic

Parrots. I’m not a fan. Every parrot I’ve ever met was very angry, caged and highly likely to peck a hole in your finger if you tapped on their wire door to say hello. They’re also a bit thick – they just repeat whatever they hear; though some may enunciate better than most humans, they have no understanding of what the words actually mean.

That’s why it’s fun to teach them to swear.

I figured it was the cage that upset them, as birds in nature have 360 degrees of sky. What caged bird wouldn’t be angry?

Turns out, though, they’re just as bad tempered, noisy and annoying in the wild.

There are flocks of green parrots in Barcelona, and most of them seem to hang out in the trees right outside the front door of my house in lieu of a cage.

Waaaak, waaaaaaaak! WAAAAAAAK!

All day long. Hundreds of them.

They never repeat any words, or say anything interesting they heard out there on the street. No swear words – just the same old waaaaak, waaaaaak, WAAAAAAK!

I happened to mention this flock of green pests over Christmas dinner with my kids’ Spanish grandfather and he knew all about them.

They’re small parrots, parakeets – monk parakeets, to be precise – and they aren’t native to Barcelona or Spain. They’re originally from South America and, so the story goes, they arrived in Catalonia in the mid 1970s when a truck carrying them to Barcelona zoo overturned and they escaped. They then bred like proverbial flies.

That might just be urban legend but, however they got here, they’re now everywhere.

Waaaaak, waaaaaak, WAAAAAK!

I had a stroll along the coast from Barcelona over the Christmas break, enjoying the winter sun – every tree along the way seemed to have a flock of green parakeets hiding within its branches. The ones I didn’t see, I could hear.

Waaak! Waaaaaaaaak! WAAAAAAAK!

Professional bird spotters had a go at counting them a few years ago and found there were at least 20,000 of them across Spain, from Barcelona to Madrid to Valencia. They’ve been spotted in every city in Spain, pretty much. But 20,000 must be a vast understatement because there are at least that many of them in the trees outside my house.

Waaaak! Waaaak! WAAAAAAK!

They were first spotted in 1975, giving some credence to the spilled zoo truck yarn, and they are now officially classified as pests. Experts reckoned there were somewhere around 6,500 in both Madrid and Barcelona and their theory is that they probably first arrived as pets with immigrants from Argentina. They were even given the name “the Argentinian Parrot”, and put on a list of prohibited pets in 2013.

The Madrid government even added them to a “capture or kill” list in an attempt to get their numbers under control.

“These birds are not migratory but are pretty much sedentary. Of all the birds brought here, it is probably the species that has grown most in numbers,” Juan Carlos del Moral, a coordinator for ornithologist group SEO/Birdlife’s, told El Pais. “They are highly visible because they adapt well in urban areas. Now the problem has gotten out of hand and you’d need to spend a lot of public money to eliminate them.”

Though some people, especially tourists see them as pretty little creatures, if a little loud, experts say they’ve had a negative impact on Spain’s natural fauna and flora and have disturbed the nests of native birds. They’re aggressive with pigeons and sparrows, forcing them to migrate, and can also carry ornithosis, also known as parrot disease, which can lead to inflammation and even severe pneumonia in humans.

They’re also, as I may have already mentioned, very loud and very annoying.

Waaaak, waaaaaak, WAAAAAK!