On the morning of 9 July 2025, the residents of Amityville’s Snug Harbour retirement community noticed the power go out. Again.
A regular occurrence over the previous few years, they called the authorities, who determined that the power lines had been vandalised. And the culprit? A flock of monk parakeets who had built their nest at the top of a utility pole. It had shorted the electrics.
Monk parakeets, otherwise known was Quaker parrots, are small, bright-green, yellow-bellied parrots. They originate from South America but took a punt on global expansion when they escaped from the pet trade and established themselves in parts of Europe and America. Now, many hundreds of thousands are thriving across their non-native range.
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Not a problem, if you like your wildlife neon, but a potential nuisance if you like your power lines functional. Monk parakeets are gregarious birds that build large, communal nests. These are complex, multi-chambered structures that are built from sticks, and set high on top of trees, utility poles and towers.
Each pair of birds has its own compartment with entrance, and the nests are often added to, year on year. This means they can get very big indeed. Some contain more than 200 ‘apartments.’ A single nest can be as large as a Ford Fiesta and as heavy as a polar bear.
In residential areas they can be an electrical hazard and a fire risk, prompting the search for a non-lethal solution. Kevin Burgio from the University Connecticut and colleagues studied the birds’ nest-building behaviour and found that construction always follows a similar pattern.
The parakeets always build their nests at the intersection of a wire and pole, but they don’t fly to the site directly. They land on the line and then walk to pole. “They look like a guy walking a gangplank with a stick in his mouth,” said co-author Margaret Rubega. So, to prevent the nests being built, simply block the route along the line. Hopefully, they’ll go back to nesting in trees!
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