The Green Parrots of Uptown New Orleans Are Back!
Look who's back! The green parrots of Uptown New Orleans (technically monk parakeets), after an absence of many years, graced our telephone wires with a visit this morning. Nine of them. Squawking and flying into the thick leaves of the Japanese magnolia where the sparrows and cardinals like to hang out. I thought they used to hang out in the date palm trees on Jefferson Avenue, a block away. Some years back the city cut the palm trees down at the start of a five-year drainage project. Those palm trees were older than I am, older than any of the workers who cut them down. Nobody asked my permission to cut them down. Certainly they didn't ask the monk parakeets' permission. But there you go. So I figured the parakeets had left the area. I've never seen one on the ground; they seem to like to stay up somewhere. And they like good things to eat. They used to feast on fermented Japanese plums in the tree in my front yard. Unfortunately, what Dan Gill called fire blight kill