Michael and list, Here in southern New England there exists groups of Monk parrots. These parrots are, I believe, native to Argentina. The predominant theory is that they escaped from ships in New York city. They have been here in Rhode Island, year round mind you, for at least 15 years. I first saw one of the groups, for they have multiplied into many colonies over the years, on a Xmas morning at my parent's house where I saw 7 of them sitting on the backyard clothesline in a snowstorm! Had never heard of them, but soon a large colony took up residence in a neighbor's tree. Each pair of parrots has a seperate chamber in a huge communal nest. When they came home to roost at dusk the din was incredible. It would suddenly sound like the jungle and I'd deadpan to any visitors "oh, that's just the parrots. There's about 50 live in a tree out back." They have since moved on but colonies still thrive here abouts and elsewhere in New England I'm sure.
Charlie
--- Begin Message ---WARNING: This is off topic, so, some/many of you may wish to hit your delete button. Yesterday (Sept. 8) a very unusual occurrence took place in my yard: A flock of a dozen parrots came to eat my leftover sunflower seeds! When I went out to pick up the paper at about 8 AM I was alerted when a neighbor lady called out to me, "Mr. Blood, there are parrots in your sunflowers!" And, to my delight and amazement, there were, indeed, parrots feeding off the Russian Giant Sunflowers! I had left most of them to dry in the sun, even though the birds had been eating them�. but I had surely never seen parrots doing so. In fact, there were twelve of them � an entire flock. And beautiful they were, indeed. Most amazing, they were clearly all the same species. I grabbed my camera and went out to get some photos. You can see most of the photos I captured of these beautiful creatures at: http://community.webshots.com/album/89632975MfUNTL (Particularly nice are photos # P16 & P15) I later researched the species. They had beautiful blue heads, orangish top beak and near black bottom beak with a little blue in their underwing and red in the underside of some of their tail feathers. Their legs and feet were flesh colored and when I later examined their photos closely, I could see no bands on any of their legs, indicating they likely escaped bird importers in the Tiajuana area and/or have bread in the wilds of this area. They turned out to be Sharp-tailed Conures (Aratinga acuticaudata) which are native to Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. So, they are clearly an escaped flock that have naturalized in the area. It is very rare to see parrot flocks in San Diego, but one hears of them appearing here & there on occasion. Usually, however, such flocks are reported to contain mixed species of parrots, presumably attracted to their own kind having escaped captivity individually. This is the only occurrence I have been aware of where an entire flock was the same species. In any event, I will certainly be planting more sunflowers next year! Best wishes, Michael ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
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