Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:
When I came to Amsterdam as a graduate student in 2012, I was surprised to find the city’s parks teeming with vibrant green feathers, red beaks, and bluish tails. The birds, which looked to me like parrots, were hard to miss. They congregated in Vondelpark, close to the city’s famed museums and canals, and also in Oosterpark, where I jogged daily. Even without seeing their verdant plumage, I could hear their distinctive squeaking noises in the air.
Parrots, as far as I knew, were tropical birds—and often elusive. Even in my home country, the Philippines, where there are a number of endemic parrots, they’re a rarity, visible only to birdwatchers and hikers who go deep into the forests. Indeed, only when I took up birdwatching myself did I see some of them in the wild, making it even more astonishing to see so many in Western Europe.
Soon I learned the birds were rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri), a type of parrot. The species is native to Africa and the Indian subcontinent, but the birds have made a home in Amsterdam for decades. In the dozen years I’ve been coming and going in the Netherlands, I’ve heard and read various urban legends about how the birds got established in the city.
More here.
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