Beauty and the 'Keets
As parakeets take over New Haven, City Point residents must decide whether to protect the birds or exterminate them.
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ea Street and Howard Avenue is just like any other intersection in City Point, a neighborhood at the southern tip of New Haven. It’s a quiet, residential area, with colonial-style houses, wellmown lawns and chairs set out on the porches. Today is Wednesday, trash day, and the garbage bins have been rolled down to the curb. This, I’ve been told, is the best place to find a Monk Parakeet. Up where the branch of a nearby tree hangs over a parked car, there’s a giant bundle of dead twigs, like an enormous, desiccated beehive. As I look, a bird flutters out of the nest and lands delicately on a utility pole. It’s about a foot long and the color of lime candy, with blue-tipped wings and a short, rounded beak, like a pair of pliers. I hear a snapping sound and look over just in time to see another shock of green feathers wrestling a twig from a dead branch. The two of them look like something you might expect to find on a Jamaican doorstep singing a sweet song to Bob Marley—not here, a block away from the Connecticut Turnpike, their squawks blending with the rumble of a passing garbage truck. Monk Parakeets are native to the savannas of South America, but for the last fifty years, they’ve 8
established wild and self-sustaining colonies up and down the coast of Connecticut, as well as New York, Florida, and even parts of Texas. By nesting communally–each condo-like structure big enough to fill the back of a pickup truck–they insulate themselves against frosty New England winters. It’s still unclear how they settled here, over five thousand miles from their native habitat. But that hasn’t stopped people from theorizing. “I actually know the origin of the parakeets,” Heather writes at the bottom of an article in Damned Connecticut—an online journal featuring the “weird, the odd, or the unexplained” in Connecticut. “They appeared in Stamford in the early nineties after a truck transporting them was involved in an accident.” Lenny disagrees. “The truth of the matter is this,” he writes. “The parakeets escaped from the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport about fifteen years ago.” Another commenter, aptly named MY2CENTS, interjects. “Lenny was close ... the birds escaped from the Railway Express Terminal in Bridgeport.” The truth is probably less spectacular than the readers of Damned Connecticut would have you T HE NEW JOUR NAL
ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY LAURA PADILLA CASTELLANOS
BY JESSE GOODMAN
