Paradise found for L.A. parrots

City's trees have become home to the colorful, noisy birds

Even at the heart of the cacophony, it passes quickly. In little more than an hour, the parrots arrive at their roosts, call one another, divide up into clans, then slip into the sheltering branches of Canary Island pines, where they fall silent for a long night's sleep.

At dawn, after a short wake-up, they are off. "Parrots are like us," says Kimball Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Natural History Museum. "They commute." The reason most people only see them by day, and then only for a week or so, is that parrots travel across the city by different routes all year foraging for food. They know what's in fruit where before the keenest-eyed gardeners.

Their diets vary by species, with red-crowned parrots and mitred parakeets showing the most adaptability. Yellow-chevroned parakeets are so partial to the seedpods of silk floss trees that their population growth can be tracked where developers have used that ornamental tree.

Since 1992, importation of endangered wild birds has been outlawed and most parrots sold in stores are bred in captivity. Garrett hopes that well-managed aviculture might forestall destruction of more natural habitats. Yet where there are people who pay for parrots, there are people who smuggle them.

Emily Green writes for the Los Angeles Times.