Dress up the backyard bird feeder with sunflower seeds and cracked corn — and wait.
Parakeets just may flock to the feeder, if squirrels or other critters don’t get there first.
The parakeets most likely to visit include the blue-crowned parakeet, the nanday or black-hooded parakeet and the monk, also known as the quaker parrot.
These birds add color to our island paradise.
As they fly from a utility wire to tree branches, tourists take notice, halting their footsteps to look up and point out the bright green birds squawking in flight.
I admit that I stop to watch, too. I’ve even sat through a green light at the Holmes Beach intersection of Gulf Drive and Manatee Avenue, oblivious to blaring horns while watching the parakeets flock to the beach entrance.
Seen among the palms, the monk, the nanday and the blue-crowned look natural, but none of the parakeets seen in the wild here or elsewhere in Florida are native to the state.
In fact, none of the parakeets seen in the wild in any U.S. state are native. We had one native parakeet — the Carolina — and drove it to extinction about a century ago.
The Carolina Parakeet was found as far north as Wisconsin and as far south as Florida, but, according to the National Audubon Society, the last known wild Carolina was killed in Okeechobee County, Florida, in 1904, and the last captive Carolina died in Cincinnati in February 1918.
The Carolina suffered the fate of many birds that went extinct in the United States in the 1900s. We cleared its habitat, hunted it for plumage to decorate hats and exterminated it to grow crops.
So for several decades, there were no parakeets here, according to bird surveys. The Carolina Parakeet was gone and the species we see today didn’t arrive until the 1950s and 1960s, imported from South America as pets and now thriving.
Today, 56 parakeet species have been observed in the wild in 43 states and about 25 parakeet species are breeding in 23 states, according to a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Ornithology that used information from Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird database.
The monk is one of the more successful non-native parakeets in the United States — breeding in the wild in at least 10 states as early as 1968.
On Anna Maria Island, the monk’s population seems to rise and fall, according to the results of the Christmas count.
In 1988, the earliest year a count was conducted specifically for the island — observers reported five monk parakeets. The numbers reached 28 in 1993, 70 in 1998 and 151 in 1999.
The highest recorded number for the island was 175 in 2002.
Research shows that the monk parakeets in the U.S. invasion in the 1960s and a European invasion in the 1980s originated from the same small area — between the south of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
You’ve heard of snowbirds.
What about sunbirds?
This column was published in The Islander newspaper.
Archives for The Islander are online here.