Istanbul is not the Only City with Parakeet Problems
Every place, it turns out, eventually gets a bird it didn’t order.
by Anamaria Roa
Look up in the trees of Emirgan Park in Sarıyer, or almost any park along the Bosphorus on a clear afternoon, and sooner or later you’ll hear it before you see it: a sharp, chattering squawk, then a flash of lime green cutting across the skyline. For a city famous for its storks and its Bosphorus raptors, it’s an oddly tropical sound.
Newcomers to Istanbul often assume someone’s pet parrot got loose. Locals know better. These are rose-ringed parakeets and Alexandrine parakeets, and they’ve been calling the city home for decades, not days.
Nobody agrees on exactly how they got here. Some say a flock escaped a cargo ship on the Bosphorus. Others blame an overturned smuggling truck, or pet owners who got tired of the noise and opened a window. There’s even a local legend that the birds arrived as “refugees” fleeing the first Gulf War. What’s certain is that they were first spotted in Ankara, then spread to Istanbul, Izmir, and more than two dozen Turkish cities since.
Today, Istanbul alone is home to an estimated 5,000-plus of them, flocks of 200 to 300 strong roam the city’s forests and neighborhoods. They have also been reported to reside in other Turkish cities, including Ankara and Izmir.
Halfway around the world, the story runs in reverse
This time, Buenos Aires isn’t hosting an uninvited guest, it’s the one sending one out. The monk parakeet, sometimes called the Quaker parrot, is a common sight in Buenos Aires’s own parks, originally from the grasslands of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil.
Exported by the thousands through the pet trade starting in the 1960s and 70s, it has since built self-sustaining colonies in Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels, Chicago, and beyond. Famous for building enormous stick nests, sometimes right on power lines, and for being clever enough that researchers compare their intelligence to that of a small child.
So while Istanbul absorbs parakeets that don’t belong there, a South American parakeet has been busy colonizing the rest of the world. Barcelona alone has counted thousands of them nesting in its parks. Spain has since banned keeping them as pets entirely.
Two cities, two continents, the same accidental story, simply mirrored. Every place, it turns out, eventually gets a bird it didn’t order.
