Pushkin the Last Archive, a history of Truth.
In the nineteen fifties, Americans started getting really into exotic birds.
We sincerely hope this record will be helpful in teaching your parakeet to talk.
Think tiki bars, pink flamingos, Hawaiian shirts, pet parakeets.
Remember that your bird is an imitator and learns to talk by listening to what you say, not only words and sounds, but inflection.
The birds started flooding into the country sold as pets from South America to North In the US, they were exotic talking birds. In Argentina, they were an agricultural pest, so it was a no brainer, no problem.
During the first year, your bird should learn from fifty to one hundred words and phrases. Always be jettle with your parakeet.
He is a.
Baby, so treat him like one. Don't say hello Peter, say hello Peter.
The parakeet trade really picked up in the nineteen sixties. More than sixty thousand parakeets were imported to North America in just three years, But a lot of parakeet buyers didn't realize just how much personality they were getting with these birds. It was funny at first, that they could talk, but then kind of annoying, so people started to set their birds loose open the window. Goodbye, Peter. It was just a few at first, but then more and more
and more. Supposedly a shipping crate full of parakeets broke open at JFK Airport in nineteen sixty nine and unleashed a whole bunch into the wild accident fosters. But certainly these South American birds couldn't make it through a New York City winter. Nobody made much of it until one day in nineteen seventy one, a woman went for a walk in a park on Long Island. She saw something strange in the grass, a spot of bright green. A
baby parakeet. Wait a parakeet on Long Island. She called the American Museum of Natural History and they sent an ornithologist out to the scene. He identified the bird monk parakeet. Then he looked up and saw twenty five feet above him a nest of twigs in a tree. South American parakeets were reproducing in New York State. Peter, Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't know anything
at all. I'm Ben mat of Haffrey today on the show Parakeet Panic. When monk parakeets began to reproduce in the United States in the nineteen seventies, people freaked out. They thought this bird's population would explode and devastate our economy and agriculture. But as you have no doubt noticed, we do not live in a post parakeet wasteland. So
why the panic. I'm glad you asked, because I am obsessed with these birds, not just because they're hilarious, but because they tell a forgotten story about the founding years of the environmental movement and raise a big question about the human place in the natural world. Are we a species like any other or something entirely different. The early nineteen seventies saw the first Earth Day of the Environmental
Protection Agency. These things, and a whole lot more happened because people had come to realize that they were destroying the planet. There were rivers catching fire litter everywhere, early signs that the temperature was rising. So tropical birds living in the Big Apple so far away from where they were supposed to live, It just seemed not great humans playing with nature. Everybody knows the story about DDT and the EPA and Earth Day, but only bird nuts like
myself know the story about the parakeets. It's obviously not on the same scale, and yet it's a glimpse of something important hidden in that early environmental movement. And also it's just really funny. Monk parakeets are about the size of mourning doves or your average sidewalk pigeon, except they're bright green with blue wingtips, white bellies, and hooked beaks. They're impossible to miss. They're beautiful, gregarious, loud, and incredibly obnoxious.
Like all parrots, they have a special relationship with humans.
Birds have been transported around the world for one reason or another for two and a half thousand years.
Stephen prut Jones is a professor of ecology at the University of Chicago. He's emeritus now, but he spent decades of his career studying monk parakeets, especially the ones that wound up in cities across the United States. He zoomed into our interview from his basement, wearing a red beanie like Jacques Cousteau. Jacques Cousteau, but for parakeets.
The first record of the rose ringed parakeet being taken from Africa to Greece was five hundred BC.
Approximately Parrots, as you may know, can mimic human speech. This has been the source of a lot of fascination and weirdness for a very long time. Ancient and medieval literature is full of parrots being mistaken for humans, parrots helping King Arthur find love, or singing the praises of Caesar,
or engaging in deep conversation with the Pope. One origin story about parrots has it that the grandson of Prometheus, the guy who created people out of clay, begged the gods to take him out of the human world, and so they turned him into a bright green bird. The first scientific account of a parrot was Aristotle's History of Animals, where he described them as human tongued and noted that they become even more outrageous after drinking wine. That's kind
of been the score on parrots ever since. People are enchanted by them and then completely annoyed by them.
So it's been a bit of a roller coaster. And in Argentina there was a bounty put on them, and you could go out and kill them, and you'd get some amount of money for a pair of legs if you brought them in. And I was even told that if you were a rancher or a farmer in Argentina and you had monk parakeets nesting on your property, you were required by a lot of kill them. So there was a huge effort to control population numbers.
In parts of South America, monk parakeets were just called la plaga the plague, because reportedly they'd eat up all the crops and party all the time in their huge nests. But they were pretty, and maybe the part about them being outrageously destructive and annoying got lost in translation, because, like I said, tens of thousands of them were sold to Americans who were intrigued for a moment and then
soon thought what have I done. There's this kind of constant push pull between fascination with the bird and sort of hatred of the bird, for you know, parroting is a negative term, and I know one of the thoughts is that pet owners might have been releasing parakeets because they're such loud, rambunctious creatures that they didn't know what they were getting into when they bought them.
I'm sure that's the case. If a pair of amongk parakeets cost somebody one hundred dollars and it was ruining their life because of loud noise and refusing to learn, you know, to mimic human speech, that's something else entirely. So when these birds were seen around the United States in the late sixties, was that they were going to become a huge agricultural past.
By the time the ornithologists who spotted the parakeet and nests back in Long Island brought word to New York City, the government was already doing its own bird watching. That spring May nineteen seventy one, the US Fish and Wildlife Service put out a pamphlet.
Some exotic plants and animals are extensively useful to man. Others cause great damage or serious inconvenience. The monk parakeet is such a bird.
This episode draws heavily from a seven hundred and eighty three page archival file I found in the New York State Archives, which is page for page some of the funniest reading I have ever done. But the last archive is not a major emotion picture. This is not an ensemble cast. So every time you hear this guy.
Some of these birds have evidently escaped or been liberated.
It's the voice of the US government, and they're pretty upset.
If this species should become abundant, serious damage to agricultural and orchard crops can be expected. Common sense clearly indicates that this potential pest should be eliminated in the wild and its further importation.
Prohibited Code red. This is not the time for your frivolous bird watching. The parakeets are spreading and the government wants to kill every last one to avert near certain disaster. It was like a trailer for an apocalyptic ego thriller.
In a world where there's no food, where mankind has been wiped down by whatever diseased parokeet to carry, the last man faces down his greatest enemy, the monk parakeet.
And rightly or wrongly, that was the initial idea. We should go out and remove them all, or we should go out and kill them, because we don't want them to become another news starling.
Ah, yes, the starling situation. Starlings are a bird that always comes up when people talk about the dangers of invasive species. Here's how the story goes. In eighteen ninety, a German immigrant named Eugene Sheeflin wanted to bring birds from Europe to the New World so other European immigrants would feel more at home. Also, he was supposedly a shakespeare nut, and he wanted to make it so that every bird mentioned in Shakespeare would live in the wild
in North America. The logic of this is kind of hard to follow. Like you drop a bit of your sandwich in the park, get mobbed by starlings, and remember that you've never read Henry the Fourth. I don't know Eugene. Also, there is only one mention of Starling's in all of Shakespeare,
and not a very important one. But that didn't stop Eugene from taking sixty of the birds out to Central Park in March of eighteen ninety, where he unleashed them into the wild, setting in motion and infestation that has since grown to several hundred hundred million birds across the US, doing about eight hundred million dollars in agricultural damage per year.
That was the Starling situation, or so the story goes, an example of just how destructive introduced species can be, and so when the monk parakeet showed up in the United States. In New York, State officials were dead set never again.
Wanted information relating to escaped alien.
There are even wanted posters if you.
See this bird, please report your observation.
In the spring and summer of nineteen seventy two, there was a flurry of meetings in New York. The Audubon Society, the Museum of Natural History, the Sierra Club, all of them got together to pour over what information existed on the monk parakeet and rally around the cause of killing every last one. They put out an article in the July issue of the Conservationist magazine. There were ads in newspapers and on the race sounding the alarm asking people to write into the state if they'd seen one of
the birds in the wild. Some people had actually managed to catch the birds and wrote wondering if now that meant they had to kill them. Here's a letter that I found in the state archives from one tri State mom in nineteen seventy two.
In December of seventy two, my son ne died a parrot in our backyard.
At first we thought it was someone's pet because it was very cold, below ten, and we were afraid it would die.
However, the parrot lived and it is doing very well.
We planned to keep the bird for a while anyhow, as my son is very interested in him.
Then he has no trouble.
I got curious about these stories, and so I tried to track some of the families down to see what it actually happened with the recaptured birds.
What the heck was that is? Where did you find it?
This is the kid from the letter, John Sime, the one who needed the parakeet. He's sixty six and living in North Carolina. Now, I looked up the address on the envelope his mom sent into the archives. Found his brother, got John's number and called him up Department of Parakeet Investigations, and I was like.
Wow, that's amazing. There's a parrot in our back gud. I just figured he was gonna die because it was it was really cold. I said, I got a crabin net down the basement. So I went down the basement and I got the crabin neet. Oh no, get real close to him, and he was a nasty sucker. He was trying to bite through the net. If we reached torn. He tried to bite it us. I named him Jackson because the expression in the seventies was no way Jackson. And as I was running after him with the crabinet,
I said, no way, Jackson. Did you getting away this time?
Wait?
What are you I saying?
I've never heard of saying no way Jackson?
No way Jackson, which means and that's not going to happen.
John got the bird inside. Eventually they got a cage and some chicken wire for outside, and the bird warmed up to them.
He got to be one of the family. I took a cassette tape and made a loop out of it, my sister staying Hi, and he learned to say hi. But he was You couldn't handle him. If you reached in the cage, he was going to try and bite you. My dad had an organ in the house and he used to play the organ, and when he would play the organ, that bird would go absolutely nuts, saying you would dance. He would hang upside down. The doorbell would ring, and before the dog would start barking, the bird would
start go. He'd make this real low, gravelly sound. If we were messing around in the house and everybody started laughing, the bird would laugh like my mom.
The bird lived with the family for about ten years. Sim is pretty sure Jackson actually wasn't among parakeet at all, just some other kind of parrot that had gotten out, and much the same way as the parakeets did. Someone just threw it away. That's why this is to me a kind of parable for the problems the environmental movement was trying to solve. This was a living creature that we treated like track, and then that set in motion a whole chain of events that threatened to throw our
civilization totally out of whack. And then what was our response? Kill them all? Officials gathered up the data, they set in motion a plan to track down each of the birds reported in the letters, all the nests and all the good apple eating spots, to prepare for a showdown, one big push to kill every last monk parakeet in the United States. The hunt begins after the break. In April of nineteen seventy three, the campaign to eradicate the
monk parakeet began. In a front page story The New York Times reported that agents of the newly formed Department of Environmental Conservation and the US Fish and Wildlife Services would move against the birds by means of live trapping, use of steel traps, toxic materials to cyanide gas devices to electrocute the birds, and caponization, by which they meant neutering.
The eradication is a large undertake. It indicates that there are some four hundred to six hundred monk parakeets in New York. It indicates that these birds are located in some thirty four known locations in eleven other states. A realistic appraisal must recognize that birds conceivably could be existing in anywhere from two to probably an excess of ten times the number of known locations.
The time to act was yesterday.
Tens of thousands of mandays must be rapidly mobilized. It must be taken into account that the population at hundreds of known and unknown locations will be reproducing, and that a doubling of the existing population could be occurring every second, third, or fourth year.
For public relations purposes, they described with they were doing as retrieval rather than eradication. The agents, a core crew of six with over seventy additional staff available, set out into the field to run down the tips and find the birds to kill before they spread wildly out of control and ate up all our food. Problem was these birds are quite intelligent.
So it's really hard for example, to go out and catch birds in the same way, you know, two days in a row, two weeks in a row, even two months in a row.
Elizabeth Hobson runs a lab at the University of Cincinnati that studies how birds think. She's made a bunch of studies of monk parakeets because it turns out they're really smart because.
They've seen a trap and they are onto you. So that makes it frustrating, and I think that that translates over into you know, it's been really hard to figure out how to mark them or put any kind of trackers on them, because they're really good at chewing things off.
They're very destructive.
So I, for example, tried to radio track them by putting a tracker on a steel cable wire around their necks, and they were able to chew through the steel cable wire and if they can't reach it, their buddy can reach it and get it off. So they're continually outsmarting us. And in the lab we actually joke that sometimes we feel like they're getting together at night and plodding how to ruin our experiments.
The state agents ran into the same kind of problems killing the birds as Hobson faced studying them. There is this whole network of state agents writing to each other about the birds, swapping tips, tracking leads. One agent in New Jersey wrote to New York to share a lovingly detailed sketch of a complicated trap he'd been noodling on, involving a tall pole, several s'mores, and a decoy monk.
Parakeet bull trap not yet tested.
The guys in the monk parakeet brain Trust remind me of nothing so much as wiley coyote trying to catch road runner. It's like they're ordering these traps from the Act Corporation, and they keep blowing up in their faces, rocketing them into dangling rocks, or sending them hurtling onto canyon floors.
Dear mister Buono, we have received a report of large numbers of monk parakeets on Riker's Island.
Early in the campaign, the guys at HQ got a note from an NYC corrections officer at the infamous jail on an island in the East River. He said one day he was walking around on patrol and noticed inmates throwing bread out the window to a hungry parrot. This struck him as strange, so he asked around and learned from an inmate that there were one hundreds more parakeets in an abandoned house on the island. He called for reinforcements.
It took the boys at HQ about a year to get cleared to come to the island, and they got there on two conditions, no guns and no women. So ten guys from Fish and Wildlife sailed out to the island, presumably with a bunch of nets to chase the birds around for a bit and work up a sweat. But monk parakeets move fout faster than state bureaucracy, so by the time they got there, the birds had moved on.
As the birds reproduced and spread, the state seemed to miss the fact that the worst effects they'd predicted weren't coming to pass. The parakeet population wasn't exploding, There wasn't really any evidence of agricultural damage. There were no parasites or diseases found in testing, but there were some complaints about the raucousness, the absolute nuisance of these birds.
It's usually on the ground when they're foraging, and then kind of a fight breaks out.
Elizabeth Hobson again close scientific associate of the monk.
Parakeets, And they end up kind of almost like those old cartoons, right where there's a dust cloud and there's dogs and cats and there's a leg sticking out, though there's another leg or a foot or something. And then what I'll see in the flight pen is that all the other birds that are uninvolved to get very excited.
They fly down to the ground. They come running over and you can see them craning the neck to see what's going on.
And then some birds will jump.
Into the fight, some will jump.
Back, and then I'll just calm down, I'll go back to foraging. So they are a very feisty species. They tend to fight a lot, and they seem to be throwing a lot of brain power at these.
Fights, so they're a loud in cartoonish. But that was kind of it. But the main government guy behind the parakeet campaign couldn't let it go, just kept pushing it. The birds they're still out there. We still need to kill them all. Even years later, when just about everyone else had moved on his boss sent him a letter telling him to give it a rest.
I find it interesting that you have time to write me memos on monk parakeets but cannot find the time to complete your reports and make progress on the Wildlife Disease Manual. The manual was one of the major justifications for creation of the position you now occupy.
It's hard to predict the future, and introduced species can absolutely become real problem. This is true for any number of species, including some parakeets. It's not a good thing that these birds are reproducing in new places. But what I'm interested in is how the response seemed to get a little outsized. It was like the guys trying to eradicate the parakeets at some point when all captain a have in the Great White whale. They so overshot the mark.
And these were smart people, So why what was really going on here in New York? You've got the panic about monk parakeet population, but elsewhere at the same time, what a lot of environmentalists were really worried about was human overpopulation. And it turns out that's always been lurking in the background of invasive species panics. So let's take
another look at the starlink situation. A couple of years ago, a paper came out in Duke's Journal of Environmental Humanities that took a hard look at that story and how it emerged over time. To recap the big points, Shakespeare nutt starts infestation of birds that does eight hundred million dollars in damage a year. The thing is, though, it turns out that basically nothing in that sentence is true. Eugene Chieflin wasn't the first person to introduce the starlings
in the US. He wasn't even a Shakespeare nut And the eight hundred million dollars in damage, that number comes from a study that blames human agricultural practices for the damage, not starlings. It just got said once and then everyone went around parroting it. That story got told in a big way right around when the parakeet eradication campaign was happening. Different bird, same story, same moral. Back in the nineteenth century, that starling guy was in actuality the chair of something
called the American Acclimatization Society. Acclimatization societies were influenced by the theories of Thomas Malthus, the famous economist who thought human population would explode and cause first famine and then mass death. The acclimatization people figured introducing exotic species and new environment could help save the day, maybe by improving domestic agriculture or just being a new thing people could eat. They brought zebras and kangaroos to Paris and Chinese sheep
to London. That was the early history of invasive species, intentionally introduced, among other reasons, to feed a human population that seemed to be growing out of control. Over the course of the twentieth century, ecologists and animal scientists kept studying the way animal populations worked booms and busts. They wanted to quantify that pattern, which meant you could predict it too. The thing is, those ideas didn't stay limited
to animal scientists. William Vote, an ornithologist, published a hugely popular book called Road to Survival in nineteen forty eight, warning about human overpopulation, a similar kind of boom bust cycle, just with us, not animals. By the early nineteen seventies, that idea that human populations works floating like animal populations. It was everywhere, not like academic quibbling, but an issue discussed in the news and on television, like in this interview with the biologist Paul Erlick.
Doctor Erlick, when did the thought first come to you that perhaps our time as mankind and earth was limited?
Oh, came in nineteen forty nine when I read a book by William Vote called Road to Survival.
Almost twenty years after he read that book, Paul Erlick wrote his own incredibly popular book called The Population Bomb. He predicted there'd be mass death from starvation because there were just too many people. This was not at all a fringe idea. Eric went on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson eighteen times.
The only hope that there is is that we will be able, at least in the United States, through the political process, to get a government that's courageous enough to say, look, we're overpopulated and we have to have population control and start moving in that direction.
He spoke all over the world. He was one of eight people on the steering for the first Earth Day in April nineteen seventy, and human population growth was a major concern of the event. That activism led to a bunch of influential environmental laws. But Earth Day also came just two months before the first National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment. That same year, six months after Earth Day, Congress created the Office of Population Affairs to work on
human population control in the United States. And in nineteen seventy two, the year the panic about the monk parakeet was heating up, one of the best selling books in the world was called The Limits to Growth, another thing about uncontrolled growth. It was a huge media moment. The tape I'm about to play you is from a spooky documentary made about it. It's like every stock image of a smokestack, traffic jam, or smoggy city scape. This movie's got it.
Our riches and our numbers burdened the world.
Limits was a huge deal. It was a scientific report issued by a mysterious organization of academics, statesmen, and businessmen. They worked with a supercomputer at MIT that ran a program tracking major trends in five key aspects of the global economy, natural resources, agriculture, pollution, industrialization, and human population. They laid out the base case in the documentary. They used the.
Computer to see what would happen if man successfully tackled his obvious problems.
But first they ran the computer to see what direction the world would take if it ran its present course.
The prediction nothing good. Population grows and so does agriculture in industry, but then that big population uses up all the resources, and without resources, industry collapses, which leads to a kind of doom loop within farming and then food, so everybody dies off. If you've ever played SimCity or roller coaster Tycoon, the Limits to Growth is basically that feeling when the doom loop starts and all you can do is watch your city or your roller coaster go
careening off the tracks. Now, unfortunately for them, in nearly all their models, civilization just kept collapsing. Not great. Also, The Limits to Growth was outsold in nineteen seventy two by a book called The Joy of Sex, which kind
of sums the whole thing up. By the next year, nineteen seventy three, a movie called Soilent Green was in theaters, and it literally opens with the documentary montage of overpopulation and pollution, and then it gives a log line the year twenty twenty two, the place New York City, the population forty million people. There isn't enough food for everyone, so they're reading these cracker things called Soilent Green.
A new delicious soilent green.
The miracle food of high energy is plankton gathered from the oceans of the work.
Now, no spoilers, but soilent green is not made of plankton, and it has a lot to do with the overpopulation problem. Okay, fine, here's a spoiler.
Silent breed is paper.
So all this is the backdrop to the parakeet retrieval campaign, and I actually think this was a really damaging thing for the environmental movement. Too many people is not the problem. The problem is the system. Those people work within, the polluting tools they're given, what big companies do with the money those people spend. But the population control evangelists and the environmental movement came together right at that same parakeet
moment in the nineteen seventies. The fear about the parakeets, it was just another fear about uncontrolled population growth, like soilent green or the limits to growth, just for parakeets, the bird that takes whatever we say and repeats it right back.
I sheltered.
I still time too.
The retrieval program began to wind down in nineteen seventy four. Mission accomplished the birds in New York State, seemed to be almost entirely wiped out. Some of the officials took a victory lap wrote up a draft of a paper about how they'd killed off the invasive population for a conference in New Jersey.
Today, with the exception of an estimated nine to ten birds at large.
This problem has been solved.
If this species becomes established in this country, it will not be from New York.
Stock On that draft in the state archives you can see penciled in notes from another state official after nine to ten birds at large, he wrote, which we also intend to get and to the sentence this problem has been solved, they added one word.
Apparently, my function is sort of like the pr guy for the pirates, because there is a lot of negative press about them. They're invasive, they hate robins, they're messy, they they don't respect us and.
All they hate robins.
No, no, that's a lie, this is propaganda.
A couple weeks before Christmas twenty twenty two, I went to the largest cemetery in Brooklyn with a man named Steve Baldwin. He runs a website called Brooklyn Parrots, and we were there to see the Brooklyn parakeets and to
talk about how he became the parrot pr Guy. It was almost exactly fifty years after the eradication campaign began, and the birds, who are supposedly all dead, about forty of their descendants were living in one massive nest in the cemetery, in the most ostentatious part of the place of the main gate. I asked Steve how he'd become a bird guy, and he told me a story from about twenty years earlier, when he was out of work
living at his mother in law's place in Yonkers. One day he was walking in Central Park with his daughter, and then he heard a group of people in the distance, and.
They were chanting a bunch of things, but I remember hearing they were chanting all together, bring back the nest, Bring back the nest, Bring back What is this?
I have to know?
The group was protesting the eviction of a hawk named Pale Male. He'd made a nest on a fancy apartment building by Central Park. The building had destroyed it, and now there were protesters holding vigil in the park. There's a term in birding that I love, spark bird, the bird that gets you into birds. For me, it was a mourning dove who'd roost on our fire escape every morning during the first month of the pandemic. For Steve, it was that celebrity hawk.
I mean, I joined the group.
I came by as much as I could. I had like a little crummy temporary job, but I come up after work and we chant through the night. It's one of the reasons why I left Yonkers, because my mother in law saw me on television and said, what the hell are you doing with your life?
He got kicked out, but it was a blessing in disguise because Steve, a lifelong New Yorker, had finally found his people. He became a bird guy. But after Pale Mail, he was looking for another cause. That's when he heard about a colony of much malign parakeets living in the old soccer field of Brooklyn College.
And I thought, my goodness, this is strange. And I went out there and I was blown away. It's not only were there like I thought there might be a handful, but there was like a community.
There were about hundred of them, one hundred words.
And I said, my God, and I remember, this is the transcendental moment. I was out there on the old soccer field and I was looking up and the birds were all around, and then I could hear the bells and I could hear the squawking. I said, this is this profound moment of synchronicity in my life, and perhaps.
I'veound my calling.
Steve moved to Brooklyn bought a web domain Brooklyn parrots dot com. He calls himself the parakeet pr guy because after the eradication campaign, the birds had a bad rap. They'd reached an uneasy truce with the state and we're living mainly in nests in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn College. But even though they'd been reproducing in New York for generations, they were still thought of as alien invasive. So Steve started posting photos of the birds, writing about their comings
and goings. As interest grew, he started doing monthly parrot safaris around Brooklyn, taking people to see the nests. He did it for nearly fifteen years until COVID, and even then he's still out there all the time.
You can imagine if you're listening to this or as we can see right now, this is a very beautiful gay made out of brown stone. It's probably about seventy five feet tall. I'm not sure exactly how tall it is. But at the top of it you can see that looks like it's covered with a kind of a Yeah, it's.
Just like a sort of like growth of twigs.
Yeah, it looks almost like a beard that's on top of this structure, and we're.
Like a tupe, like a bad tupeg.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course that that mass is composed of thousands and thousands of individually placed twigs that were gathered from the trees in this immediate area and brought up individually by by the wild parrots. Other birds build nests, they they're not really very well crafted. The mont parakeet builds a nest that is exquisitely.
This thing we're looking at is just elaborate.
I mean, it's impressive. And although we can't see them right now, they're not working. They're not working on the nest right now. But when they are working on the nest, they seem to be almost obsessive about getting everything right.
These birds were all descend from the birds brought into the country as pets, and now they were living free in the city in a colony with little apartments for each bird. If you talk to scientists about the parakeets. They'll tell you it's hard to generalize between the different populations in different places, and between captive and wild, because
these birds are smart and adaptive. So Steve seemed to me like the right guy to ask about how the New York birds acted, not only because he gives that parakeet safari, but also because he'll tell you he identifies with the parakeets. I noticed as he spoke he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, kind of like a parakeet, just in a black windbreaker and cap.
Ah wait, I hear the call of the wild.
It should be noted that, as you said that, we're in a freezing cold cemetery with nobody around.
Yes, yes, up, they go, two of them going off, the dynamic duo heading off to the east. Who knows what they're up to, but let's see, they're sort of circling around.
It looks like one of them maybe chasing the other. When the cemetery was built in the nineteenth century, there was a native parakeet living in the United States, the Carolina parakeet. People talk about how introduced species can cause native species to go extinct, and that's true, but that's also just another way of saying that people drove that species extinct. The Carolina parakeet went extinct in the early twentieth century in part because people hunted it for its feathers,
which were popular in hats. Baldwin thinks there's an ecological niche left for the monk parakeet because of the killed off Carolina one. This is just a strange opportunity to right or wrong. Most people in New York have no clue that there are parakeets living in the wild here.
Because the population grew at a reasonable rate. Monk parakeets have become the second most widespread parrot in the world, and they do cause problems for some people in some places Florida, especially because they like to nest in utility poles and that can cause power outages. But in terms of those initial worries hordes of parakeets marauding across the country, decimating our food supply, it just never happened. It's just like that spark bird. It's not about the parakeets. It
was never about the parakeets. It's just that they're the thing we notice when the problems people have set in motion come home to Roost. The Last Archive is written and hosted by Me Ben Nattaphaffrey. It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gomperts. Our fool Proof players are Becca A. Lewis and Robert Ricotta. Our
executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin Executive Editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior in the Stargenette Foundation Special Thanks to Dove Sachs, Grace Smith Vedare, and the New York State Archives. For a bibliography, further reading, and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm Slash Newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Nattafhaffrey.