Nobody Let Them Out

There are ring-necked parakeets in almost every London park now, bright green, loud, entirely at home in a Croydon plane tree in February.

Four stories explain them. Jimi Hendrix released a breeding pair on Carnaby Street, on acid, in 1968. A flock escaped from the set of The African Queen when filming wrapped in 1951. Birds got out of the aviary at Syon Park when an aircraft came through the roof. Aviaries were smashed in the Great Storm of 1987.

In 2019 a team from Queen Mary, UCL and Goldsmiths tested them, using geographic profiling — a technique built for narrowing down lists of suspects in serial crime — against half a century of sighting records. None of the supposed release sites showed up in the profiles.

Then they went at it from the other end and searched the British Newspaper Archive: nearly four thousand pages mentioning parakeets between 1804 and 2008. If a flock of exotic birds had got loose in west London in 1951, or on Carnaby Street in 1968, a local paper would have run it. Nothing. Not one contemporary report of any of the four events. The oldest media mention of Hendrix or The African Queen in connection with the birds is a BBC News piece from 2005.

The Great Storm is the easiest to dispose of, since parakeets were already breeding across London through the seventies. And The African Queen was not filmed at Shepperton anyway. It was shot at Worton Hall in Isleworth.

Wild sightings in Britain go back to 1855 in Norfolk, and the 1930s in Epping Forest.

What the study suggests instead is far better. In 1961 caged birds were more popular pets in Britain than cats or dogs — something like eleven million of them. And twice, in 1929 to 1931 and again in 1952, the British press ran lurid coverage of psittacosis, parrot fever, a lung infection people were catching from their birds and occasionally dying of.

The proposition is that a lot of frightened people opened a lot of cages, in a lot of different places, at roughly the same time.

Which makes the parakeets in Kensington Gardens a monument to a public health scare. Not a rock star, not a film set, not one dramatic night of weather — thousands of ordinary households reading something alarming in the paper and quietly getting rid of the bird.

The legends will outlive the finding. They are better stories, and they name someone. The truth here is diffuse, undramatic and everybody’s fault, which is how most invasions actually happen and is exactly why nobody wants it.