The feral parrots were freaking me out.
They are avian interlopers from the south, and with their iridescent mustard-and-emerald plumage they are impossible to miss.
You see flocks of them dipping and darting over the bumper-to-bumper traffic at certain San Gabriel Valley intersections, or perched on palm trees overlooking mini-mall parking lots.
Take one look at their tropical coloring, listen to their loud jungle squawks and you might say to yourself, as I did: These birds don't belong here.
The feral parrots are the descendants of caged pets and birds kidnapped from rain forests. Their real homes are in the vast plains of the Amazon and the steamier corners of Mexico and Guatemala, thousands of miles to the south.
Watching a flock of about 20 flapping loudly and taking off over a supermarket in South Pasadena, I wondered if they were a danger to the landscape. It feels like a silly thing to write now, but this is what I felt then: The feral parrots offended the California purist in me.
So I called one of the leading bird experts in Los Angeles County, Kimball Garrett, author of books on the birds of our region. Garrett is a native Angeleno who's been tracking birds since he was a kid in the 1960s living on the edge of Griffith Park.
After talking to Garrett for an hour, it was clear that I was guilty of a sin common to journalists everywhere. We get so caught up with the strange, the annoying and the disturbing, that we fail to notice and tell of the enduring beauty of the everyday.
Garrett and I started talking about feral parrots and ended up with hooded orioles, mockingbirds and the elusive great-tailed grackle.
He didn't seem especially worried about the parrots.
"There go a couple of yellow-chevroned parakeets right now," he told me, pointing out the window of his office at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, at Exposition Park.
Garrett said the appearance of the feral parrots a couple of decades ago was just another episode in a century and a half of history in which the region's flora and fauna have undergone great changes, thanks to human activity.
Look at a photograph of mid-19th century Los Angeles, for example, and you'll see hardly any trees. The planting of countless fruit trees and palms helped change the avian universe around us.
"We don't have pristine anything anymore," Garrett said. "And we are way beyond the point of insisting that our ecosystems remain pure and free of nonnative species."
