I got the message late at night on my answering machine: “The peregrines are eating the parakeets.” It sounds like something Aldrich Ames might have sent in code to the Russians, but it was my friend Chuck Thurow, who’d picked up this juicy bit of nature gossip at a dinner party in Hyde Park. The host suspected that a peregrine falcon was gobbling up the monk parakeets that normally frequent his bird feeder.
In 1974 a group called the Peregrine Fund was established to try to protect what was left of the falcon population and if possible to increase its numbers. Largely as a result of the organization’s efforts and the banning of DDT, the falcons slowly began to recover. One of the fund’s innovative programs encouraged the release of falcons in large cities, where tall buildings simulate the cliff-and-canyon environment falcons favor for nesting and where large populations of pigeons provide an ample food supply. Successful programs were launched in New York, Boston, Dallas, and, in 1986, Chicago.
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Unlike the elegant peregrine, the monk parakeet is a flashy bird. About the size of a pigeon, it’s a gaudy shade of green with a light-colored breast and smudges of eye-shadow blue on each wing tip. Its favorite food is dandelions, the lowliest weed of all, but it will eat almost anything. Monk parakeets have even been known to eat fermented hawthorn berries, then stagger around shamelessly in drunken stupors.
Anderson believes in a combination theory. He thinks the birds sprung loose at Kennedy may have scattered throughout the country, but in Chicago they encountered enough other monk parakeets released by unhappy pet owners to start a colony.
Wollmann was the one who told Chuck Thurow about seeing the peregrine pick off a parakeet, which he assumed was the reason they weren’t coming to his feeder. When I asked Wollmann about it he said that he couldn’t call it a trend, that actually his roommate saw it happen once last September. And since peregrine falcons fly to Texas and Mexico for the winter, they couldn’t be responsible for scaring the parakeets away from his feeder during the colder months. “Maybe the neighbors have better birdseed,” he suggested.
