Wandering Minstrels

For those of you who are fully aware of this phenomenon in California and other states, you can skip this entry. But for those for whom this is news, and are looking for the wonder here in this land of millions of people, perhaps you will find this as fascinating as I do, here is another wonder of the world.

Spent last weekend with the brother and sis-in-love in the spread that is San Diego, and we happened to be in a neighborhood that caused my brother to sit up in the back seat and say, "Hey, start looking in the trees. Here is where the wild parrots take up to roost." I had a documentary on my Netflix called "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which speaks of this phenomenon in San Francisco, but I didn't know that the birds had also found homes in SoCal, so I eagerly looked into the hair-roots of the trees with my family. We were there only briefly, and didn't spot any, but I was full of wonder at the thought, and considered watching the movie this weekend of the San Francisco/NorCal version.

"The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" is a luscious, colorful, measured account of the works of Mark Bittner, homeless man turned parrot scholar who studied the parrots for six years in the 90's. There was not a single moment of this movie that didn't capture me, and just when you think that the movie is going to leave you sad, it turns and bursts through with sunlight. (I don't think that was a spoiler.) Bittner is not someone that I would consider to be a freeloader, but a man of Thoreau-esque enthusiasms--he keeps his accounts on one hand. What is particularly remarkable (and my reason for posting this piece here instead of the mainstream Smoke Clears blog of mine), is Bittner's take on why the public should NOT feed the parrots as he did. A reader might greet this with "that Bittner is trying a little of do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do," but as Bittner states:

If the parrots became accustomed to taking food from the general public, some people might try to capture them. I'd never worried about this too much because the birds had always shown fear of other human beings, and I'd worked to keep it that way. I never let other people near them. I knew that an individual would have to spend a great deal of time getting the parrots used to the idea before they'd dare to come down to eat. The circumstances of my initial six-year period with the parrots--a situation that had provided me with enormous blocks of free time--had been unique. Not many people have that kind of free time nowadays, especially in a city as expensive to live in as San Francisco...

Several months after Bill's [someone that had written to Bittner for advice on doing an experiment like his] first email, I received another from him. He wrote to me saying that he'd ignored my advice, and now he had a bad situation on his hands. He'd spent around three months trying to attract the parrots with sunflower seeds until finally one came down to him. Soon after that, other parrots joined the first. They were perching on Bill's arms and shoulders and eating from his hand. Other people who lived and worked near the park started getting into the act. Initially the parrots were reluctant, but the lure of sunflower seeds--something parrots love--overcame their fear. Bill was writing to me because of his concern that some of the new "hand feeders" seemed not to have the flock's best interests at heart. He was worried about the flock's safety. Whenever he broached the subject of everybody stopping, the other feeders turned on him.

There are some Bittner-types who can successfully devote time to an ecological study and learn how to study it with measure and objective respect for the subject, but they aren't commonplace. Just from my experiences with friendships in this state, I have experienced that it's pretty rare for people to cultivate an attention span to anything for more than a period of six months, myself included on certain aspects. I'm not saying that you have to homeless or have won the lottery to study wildlife, but Bittner's thought is that unless you have the time and continuous inclination to support wildlife with a certain level of detachment, then for heaven's sake don't do it.

Perhaps this should be a rule to follow with any number of living things, saving a goldfish. (I'm not that fond of carp.)