Visitors who pay to view colorful, exotic animals inside the Shedd Aquarium have also been seeing some pretty exotic wildlife for free right outside the building.
In the autumn, when the bright red berries on Washington hawthorn and crab apple trees in southern Grant Park ripen, a colony of footlong South American monk parakeets noisily descends on the Museum Campus in a feeding frenzy. The lime-green birds have become especially visible next to the aquarium, which has ornamental hawthorns growing along the perimeter of its grounds.
“They really work over those trees,” said Maggie Fahner, a senior animal trainer at the Shedd. “We have gotten so many questions from visitors who see them that we had to put out a fact sheet for our employees to explain why people are seeing parrots in the park.”
A colony of monk parakeets settled into the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side in the 1970s. Ever since, their numbers have gradually grown and spread. Their presence in Grant Park is a measure of how well a rural bird from the Argentine pampas and Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia has adapted and thrived as an urban sophisticate in cold North American cities.
In 1998 only six other monk parakeet nests were known outside Hyde Park in Illinois, most of them just south of the original colony area. In 2004 there were 43 known nesting sites–many with multiple nests–outside Hyde Park, according to a study published last summer in the Illinois bird journal Meadowlark.
“Their numbers seem to be heading only one way in direction, and that is straight up,” said the author, Chicago printing company executive and avid birder Walter Marcisz.
Though called a parakeet, nothing physiological differentiates parakeets from parrots, except for size. Because of the birds’ long tails and considerable physical presence, many scientists and writers prefer to call the monks parrots.
Marcisz found a colony of 36 nests in suburban Burbank and nesting areas in several other south suburbs. He found evidence of nesting in Cicero and Berwyn, in Elmhurst and Addison in DuPage County, in McHenry County and even as far north as Kenosha.
For several years the monks in Grant Park seemed to appear only in autumn for two or three months to feed on the ripe berries, disappearing when the berries are gone, said the Shedd’s Fahner. This year, however, there is evidence that they may be building a nest near the aquarium and moving in permanently.
“It’s a thrill for our visitors and staff to see them around here,” Fahner said.
Among her duties is overseeing the care of the aquarium’s birds of prey: a great horned owl, a barred owl and a red-tail hawk. The birds, rehabilitated from severe injuries, are used not for display but for conservation lectures to children.
Every day, Fahner has keepers take the birds outside for an hour or two of basking. If the monk parakeets, who are hunted by eagles and hawks in South America, are around at such times, they raise a ruckus.
“In their home territories they would be screaming out warnings to each other that they are in danger, and that is what we see them do every time we bring out our hawk and owls,” she said.
The monks, named for the gray feather patch on their head that suggests a monk’s cowl, first came to the U.S. in the pet trade more than 50 years ago. Though nobody knows how so many ended up living wild in the city, there are two generally accepted theories.
One is that the monks can be so rowdy and noisy that some owners tired of them and shooed them out the window to freedom. Another is that some pet suppliers, having a hard time selling them–sometimes for lack of proper licensing–released the birds.
It amazes many that a South American parrot species could so successfully adapt to northern climates, winters and all.
“Most people think of parrots as tropical birds,” said Field Museum ornithologist Douglas Stotz, “but monk parakeets are a temperate-zone parrot.
“They are found in Brazil, Uruguay and northern Argentina, in places where it can go below freezing and there can be snow, so the winter here is not a total shock to their system.”
Part of their success may be that, appropriately enough for urban dwellers, they build and live in condominium nests, where they may benefit from shared body warmth. Made of sticks, foam and other foraged materials, the nests are used by multiple mating pairs, each pair having a chamber with its own entry hole.
Even so, a severe winter can be deadly. After severe cold snaps in Chicago, bird watchers have noted big drops in monk parakeet populations.
Their proliferation in the Chicago region may even be linked with the proliferation of cell phone technology, Marcisz said.
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Of the 339 parakeet and parrot species in the world, only one–monk parakeets–builds free-standing nests, usually seeking out the biggest trees they can find, ones that can support the considerable weight of their nest structures. Other species find cavities in trees to build nests and hatch eggs.
“Florida has a huge population of monk parakeets, and down there you will see the birds often build their nests in palm trees,” Marcisz said. “Up here we’re seeing many of the new cell phone towers with monk parakeet nests on them.
“My thought is that the towers are an analog to palm trees for them, a free-standing column with structure on the top that will support a nest.”
Grain eaters in their native areas, monk parakeets are considered a destructive pest to South American farmers. There is some concern that, as an invasive species, the bird could become an agricultural pest in this hemisphere if its population continues to grow and spread.
“There’s no question that people are concerned about that,” said the Field’s Stotz, adding that he doubted they would be a problem for northern farms.
“Maybe, if they colonized in orchard areas of Wisconsin and Michigan, they might raise some havoc, but the winters there would be tough on them,” he said.
Mark Spreyer, director of the Stillman Nature Center in Barrington and a bird specialist who has been watching the Chicago monk parakeets since they first roosted in Hyde Park, said he thinks the species has discovered an empty niche in cities: feeding on edible plant material that few other species are interested in.
Among the easy pickings: the tiny elm tree buds that speckle city and suburban yards and parked cars like bad dandruff in spring, dandelion fuzz, thistles, mulberries, holly berries and acorns. Some of the plant material they eat is native to the region; some of it, like the monks, has been introduced from elsewhere.
“I think it is heartening to see the place they have taken in the functioning food chain operating in the urban ecosystem,” Spreyer said. “They, in turn, are food to some of the predators occupying the same ecosystem, like peregrine falcons and, especially, Cooper’s hawks, that once were nearly extinct here but now have come back very strongly.”
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