"Regard ca," look at this, the French tourist on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill says to his young daughter. The next word needs no translation: "Wow."
The tourists are looking at Mark Bittner, and, as Judy Irving's charming and surprisingly emotional documentary "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" makes clear, he is well worth looking at.
A bearded man in a worn jean jacket, his hair tied back in a ponytail, Bittner is surrounded by 40 to 50 birds. Not just any birds, but cherry-headed conures, lime-green parrots with the reddest of tops. They sit on his arms and his head and peck at his glasses, they eat seeds out of his hand, they are completely at home with him and he with them.
"How long have you owned them?" is the obvious first question. He doesn't own them at all, Bittner replies, they're their own birds, wild as the jungles they usually inhabit. But Bittner has a passion for these parrots, he's taken the time to painstakingly befriend them, and "Telegraph Hill" takes you into his world as completely as he has gone into theirs.
Although it's only 83 minutes long, "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" is as much about human nature as it is about the avian kind. You not only learn more than you'd think there was to know about bird psychology but also about the hard-earned life experiences of a seeker after truth, San Francisco style, who found wisdom and love in the unlikeliest places.
That would be Bittner, who -- though he says, "I don't think of myself as an eccentric" -- easily fits that description. A former street musician who has fashioned his life into a spiritual journey rather than a quest for material success, Bittner has mastered urban survival skills to the point where he can make it in the city as a housesitter without any visible means of support.
Because the Telegraph Hill neighborhood where he lived in the shadow of Coit Tower had the kind of lush vegetation that attracted the parrots, Bittner became intrigued with them. And because he turned out to be an acute observer with a wry and intelligent point of view, his voice-over narration is filled with involving ideas about the parrots and their world.
Since he had the time to watch the birds (likely the offspring of freed or escaped pets) for several hours a day over the course of six years, Bittner was gradually able to differentiate among them to the point of giving each a name and a reconstructed life story.
