A peaceful, warm spring evening for all visitors to Log Lay Park in London's west suburbs was disturbed by a strange hum coming from Heathrow Airport. And literally a minute later, dozens of bright green parrots began to sit on the branches of poplars growing in the park
Video from 2009. Parrots in the garden of a Londoner.
In a few minutes, hundreds and hundreds of birds covered all the trees around the eyewitnesses. Imagine a beautiful, exotic, talkative parrot with emerald plumage and a bright pink beak. Now imagine that there is a whole flock of them around you. People walking in the park felt like characters from the horror movie "Birds".
Pearl parrots usually live on the Indian Peninsula and in sub-Saharan Africa. But now they have begun to actively populate the London suburbs and may threaten native bird species. Now bird watchers in Great Britain are going to start counting the number of London parrots.
Pearl parrot conquered Great Britain
Retired Dick Hayden says he was very impressed and even glad when he saw a bright parrot in his backyard. But it's another matter when there are already more than 300 such birds.
"They ate all the berries and all the food from my bird feeders."
There is a version that the parrots were brought in by lovers of exotic birds and released by them intentionally, or they themselves fled and subsequently multiplied incredibly in just ten years.
People have seen parrots in the UK before, but these were isolated cases and people believed that parrots could not survive in the wild of the British Isles. Now scientists offer a bunch of theories to explain the phenomenon of parrots. From attracting them with exotic plants in horticultural gardens to mitigating the UK's harsh climate.
Parrots in Ashford (east of London).
In 1995, there were about 1500 individuals. Just a couple of years ago, more than 30 thousand were counted. The reasons for this rapid reproduction are not completely clear.
Graham Marge, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says parrots love warmth and are tropical, and the UK has had at least two harsh winters lately. However, the birds managed to survive. And what's more, to multiply.
“I don't know of any mechanisms that could stop the parrots. Here they do not have predators to control their numbers. I'm not sure they are intimidated by our climate."
Scientists in the UK are now eagerly awaiting a new bird census to finally understand how the emergence of a new species has affected other birds.
British officials believe that parrots will be a big pest of agriculture, as is the case in India and other countries. However, until now they were afraid of big cities. However, small flocks of the same parrots found in London have been spotted in the suburbs of Brussels and Amsterdam.