wetlands function. There would be more money for studies, replanting, and
the encouragement of trapping and removal. Since then I myself have ob-
served a grisly aspect of the last: Every day about :..at St. Augustine’s
Alligator Farm, a large crowd flocks to witness the big-show feeding. The
biggest ’gators—each addressed by its given name—hasten to the base of
a raised platform from which a voluble farm employee calls the monsters
to feast. The treat comes in smelly buckets full of skinless nutria carcasses.
Louisiana alligators, despite their own improved population, have been un-
able to control now-native pests, so hardly feral Florida alligators receive
the dessert.
Monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) would seem the more agreeable
introduction. Native to most of the same parts of South America as nutria,
especially Argentina, monk parakeets were sold as pets and private zoo at-
tractions some time before about in Florida, New York City and nearby
New Jersey and southern Connecticut, Chicago, and probably Texas. (They
also live in parts of Europe and on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries.) In-
evitably some escaped or were released. By , friends had spotted a few
on bare winter tree limbs in Washington Park, Fort Green, Brooklyn. Other
reports confirmed year-round Monks in eastern New Jersey and Connecti-
cut, and a graduate student in Chicago did his master’s thesis on the local
(and growing) Monk population. In Florida, meanwhile, where few tree
limbs are bare in winter, the feral Monk population is estimated at ,.^17
Monks are actually parrots and are rather larger and somewhat less
colorful than domesticated parakeets. Bright yellowish-green or perhaps
what is called ‘‘bottle’’ green, adults are usually eight to ten inches long,
beak to tail-tip. They eat berries, seeds of almost anything, and fruits. The
graduate student in Chicago believes that there, in winter, Monks nourish
themselves entirely from ‘‘backyard’’ bird feeders. This may be true in the
Northeast, too. Some celebrants of the Monk parakeet proclaim the return,
in effect, of the long-extinct Carolina parakeet, which once (like passenger
pigeons) darkened the skies as it swept in force from orchard to orchard.
The Monk, however, is a sedentary creature, not a migrator. It does, how-
ever, multiply rapidly, so the Monk’s territories will likely increase. Here
appears the problem.
Monk parakeets are sweetly domestic birds, and there is something akin
to mad genius in their domestic architecture. Nests are large, relatively
heavy, intricate assemblages of mainly sticks. The nests are marvels in
themselves, but the genius, arguably, is in the Monk’s preference of loca-
tion—not in trees or atop steeples but among the supporting wires of the