Backlit, they look straight out of Hitchcock… until the light hits. Sunnyvale, March 2025.
Wild parakeets… in Sunnyvale. Have you seen them?
You will most likely hear them before you see them: their chatty squawks punctuating the air as they circle past 24-Hour Fitness, Goldstar Gymnastics and the other businesses lining Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.
They are a surreal sight, often huddled on nearby apartment buildings. I imagine their squawks as squabbles over who gets what "turf." Groups suddenly take off and land on another building, as if yes, this was planned, and yes, that's their building.
A pandemonium in a bare tree
I first spotted the parakeets near my daughter's old school, a few miles away. It was winter. I saw a woman looking up. At a tree. What could it be, I asked myself, as she stared up at the branches?
Draping the leafless tree, the parakeets were quite a sight, and a little haunting when backlit. Their troupe formed a tight-knit, daunting army, especially since you couldn't see their perky green feathers or red heads. The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock's classic, flashed before my eyes. Did I need to make a quick exit?
Suddenly the parakeets took wing into the blue, circling before landing on a nearby tree. And then I really saw them: their unique heads and body shapes, that friendly, chirpy lime green, and the squawks. Lots of squawking. Squawk, squawk, squawk. Boy, can these birds talk.
Mesmerized, I stood on the sidewalk watching the pandemonium. Did you know that's what a group of parakeets is called? A pandemonium. A great word for our squawking, squabbling feathered friends. I watched them, full of questions: How did they get here? Where are they from? Are there more?
Where did they come from?
I dove into the internet and did an image search. They are mitred conures from South America that likely got their start in the Bay Area as lost pets (or escapees!), according to this post by Maggie Benson. Before the U.S. banned the trade in wild exotic birds in 1992, the U.S. was the world's largest importer of birds. The parakeets were likely part of that pre-1992 trade, sold as pets, KQED reported.
Pandemoniums also call Palo Alto, Mountain View and Campbell home, according to this post, though I have yet to see them there. The best-known pandemonium is in San Francisco, where Mark Bittner wrote a memoir about watching them, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Until recently, the San Francisco flock was believed to be red-masked parakeets: not quite the same as Sunnyvale's mitred conures, even though they look a lot alike and both come from South America, just different countries. But genomic researchers discovered that the SF birds are hybrids of red-masked and mitred parakeets, Bay Nature reported earlier this year: "The genome reveals a human-created flock, trying to find success in a human-manipulated habitat."
How they live here
How do they make a home in this habitat? They like sleeping in holes in trees, preferably palm trees, like those in Sunnyvale's Las Palmas Park. They love eating seeds, berries and blossoms, KQED reported, and they even have their own dialect, with calls and responses unique to the flock.
"I think there is a deeper culture for the ones in the wild than the ones I've seen that imprinted as pets," Dana Torgerson, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, told Bay Nature. "I don't think that has to do with genetics; I think that has everything to do with experiences. They know each other. They remember prior activities. They hold grudges; they also hold each other dear."
Look up
I get that feeling each time I see the Sunnyvale pandemonium. They know each other. They know the area. They are an integral part of the landscape. And just by looking up, I saw them and learned their story.
That's what I encourage you to do. Even in a busy place or a hectic moment, listen, look, observe. Pull away from the screen and the tasks of the moment, be still, and discover.
I love that these parakeets are here to remind us of the bigger picture in life. I hope you can see it, and them, too.
— Miranda Leitsinger, founder of Family Adventure Squad