Denby Fawcett: These beautiful birds that spread to Oahu are noisy, fruit stealing, and pooping threats

Punctually at 6:15 a.m. every morning, about 60 rose parakeets tumble high over my house, screeching and screeching as they circled two or three times before floating down to the sea and then soaring back up into the sky before disappearing over the edge of Diamond Head .

One of my pandemic activities is watching the noisy green parakeets while I do Zoom weight training on our deck.

Driven by a curiosity to learn more about the birds, I discovered that there are many reasons why we should hate them. They eat valuable commercial fruit and corn, destroy mangoes in the residents’ backyards, poop on cars and disturb the peace with their loud chatter. They spread seeds of invasive plants and can have a negative impact on native wildlife.

There is no active effort to control their growing numbers on Oahu, and there does not appear to be any willingness to initiate a widespread management program here.

The birds are more like parrots, larger than the normal-sized parakeets we kept as pets as children. They are known as the ring-necked or ring-necked parakeet because of the black and pink feathers around the males’ necks. Hailing from South Asia, they were first spotted on Oahu in the 1930s.

Aaron B. Shiels, a research biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, estimates in an email that there are currently about 10,000 Rose Parakeets on Oahu, and their population is expected to increase each year like growing by 21% annually for more than a decade.

Says Shiels, “The extent of the damage they are doing on Oahu can certainly be reduced by management measures” – such measures could include killing and capturing them.

He says that while the number of birds on Oahu can be reduced, population extinction is unlikely. He only knows one island, Mahe in the Seychelles, on which the population of 545 rose parakeets was successfully exterminated.

The parakeets are reported in Kapiolani Park, Manoa, Waimanalo, Waipio, and Mililani.

“They are a significant threat to the Oahu agricultural industry. We need to find new strategies to control this pest before it becomes a widespread problem, ”said Jari Sugano, Oahu District Administrator of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Shiels and Nicholas Kalodimos, in an article in the journal Pacific ScienceHe called the birds “strikingly beautiful” but “unwanted intruders”. In Hawaii they are classified as “harmful wildlife”. You don’t have any effective predators here.

Anecdotal accounts of their damage to crops and property on Oahu are numerous.

Lynn Tsuruda, who co-owns Frankie’s Nursery in Waimanalo with her husband Frank Sekiya, says the ringed parakeets invade in large gangs and wipe out a rambutan tree in one day.

Tsuruda says two of her hunting friends offered to shoot the birds, but they only managed to kill two in one full day.

“When the birds saw the hunters, they just flew higher and higher,” she said. “You are very smart. They hovered high above us and screeched as if they were laughing at us. “

The hunters said there was no point in going back.

Tsuruda says her only way out now is to try to pick the fruit quickly before the birds get to it.

Shayne Stambler, a Diamond Head home owner, says the parakeets ruined most of their Rapoza mango tree harvest this summer.

Stambler said, “I don’t mind sharing some of my fruit with the birds, but the parakeets came in and started eating it when it was green, took a single bite of a green mango and went to the Next mango you take another bite and then to another mango, slowly destroying all the fruits of the tree. “

To deter them, she put out a plastic owl with a rotating head. When that failed, she dangled reflective strips of mylar from the branches of the mango tree and eventually tried to scare the birds with a big balloon with big eyes, but nothing worked.

“That’s when I realized that I had to pick all of the remaining mangoes before they were fully ripe,” she said.

Manoa’s Kristin McAndrews says the parakeets are a pesky nuisance and shed everywhere in their car. She says, “You are intelligent. If you yell at them, they’ll shriek back like they’re talking to you. “

Some parakeets in Manoa are believed to sleep in a large banyan tree in Lin Yee Chung Chinese Cemetery.

According to the Shiels, the Rose Parakeet’s excrement is a health and safety issue, it carries disease, and it attracts ants, cockroaches, and mice.

So far, invasive parakeets have been a government concern of Kauai, where after a few were released from a bed and breakfast in Lawai in the early 1960s, the population exploded exponentially over the decades to an estimated 20,000.

That is, until last spring when Kauai County paid $ 25,000 to the nonprofit Poipu Beach Foundation, which hired hunters from Kani Wildlife Control, LLC.

In addition to damaging the crops of agriculture, the birds gathered in the tourist areas of West Kauai where they poop in resort areas and tourist rental cars.

In Lihue, at the Kukui Grove Center, a particularly aggressive parakeet fell to snatch an ice cream cone from a child, according to Wade Lord, who was the mall’s asset manager at the time.

According to Nalani Brun, Kauai hunters, with state permits, used high-powered air rifles to kill nearly 10,000 of the pesky creatures that nest in the trees in the Koloa-Poipu tourist area.

The bodies of the dead birds were frozen to study their DNA and learn more about their habits.

Brun is the director of the Kauai County Economic Development Office. She says the parakeets have decimated Kauai’s tropical fruit and corn developing businesses.

“The community here loves agriculture,” said Brun. “People want farmers to be successful. The pandemic gave us the perfect chance for tourists to come in and start wiping out parakeet populations. “

She says they are in the process of obtaining permits to kill parakeet populations in the coconut groves of Kapaa.

Tropical fruit farmer Jerry Ornellas said the parakeets destroy 10 to 25% of the lychee and longan crops on his 15 acres farm in Kapaa Homesteads each year.

“The parakeets are just the latest in a long line of invasive species faced by farmers in Hawaii,” said Ornellas, a past president of the Kauai County Farm Bureau. “The sad thing is that this happened when tropical fruits were on their way to becoming one of the rising stars in agricultural production here.”

The Kauai Parakeet Control Project began after the Hawaii Legislature allocated $ 350,000 in 2016 to fund the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Wildlife Research Center, to study and provide long-term scientific methods for reducing parakeet populations in Kauai.

Jane Anderson of Texas A&M University-Kingsville led the study, which is now under final review. The results are expected to be published later this year or early next year.

Eliminating the Kauai Rose Parakeets is likely impossible right now, but the goal is to have lasting effects by reducing their numbers to manageable levels, says Tiffani Keanini, manager of the Kauai Invasive Species Committee.

“They are very intelligent birds who can adapt to controls so several methods must be used, which are changed from time to time in order to work,” she said.

Keanini, part of the group driving the research, says the goal is to use the findings from the study to support parakeet reduction projects on all islands.

The island of Hawaii has only a small population of the birds, mostly in the Puna district.

But this July, ringed parakeets were spotted on Maui for the first time in more than a decade after resident Joe Ward reported that a parakeet was eating and catching seeds at a bird feeder in the Napili area. Four other parakeets are still at large in West Maui.

Maui Department of Land and Natural Resources biologist Fern Duvall estimates that there are likely fewer than nine ring-shaped parakeets on Maui that he believes must be wiped out before they can reproduce.

The parakeets can live to be 10 to 20 years old and are productive breeders.

Duvall says the main problem with ringed parakeets is that people like them because they are beautiful.

“They’re not terrible like little stinging ants or have vicious faces like mongooses. But they’re still out of place, an invasive species that doesn’t belong in Hawaii, ”he said.

Adam Knox, operations manager for the Maui Invasive Species Committee, said, “We are at a happy stage where we have a good chance of getting rid of them completely.”

It’s a shame nothing is being done on Oahu to try to control the invasive rose-ringed parakeets if there is still a chance.

Maui-based biologist Duvall, who has worked with birds for more than 25 years, calls the lack of attention to Oahu “a missed opportunity to remove the parakeets while their numbers are still relatively few.”