Hoping for a solution to the monk parakeet problem

Monk parakeets enyoing a pine tree. Image by Jeremy SetoHere's an unlikely bird story for the holiday season. It involves some extremely loud castaway tropical birds that have been making their year-round home in Edgewater for several decades. At first, their latest saga appeared to be turning into a feel-good story, but as of this writing, the situation appears to be, well, up in the air.

The birds in question are monk parakeets, also called Quaker parrots. According to popular belief, they are the descendants of a bunch of parrots that escaped from John F. Kennedy International Airport in the late 1960s after the container that transported them from South America broke.

Although these beautiful birds have developed a loyal following over the years — and established other colonies in Ridgefield and Leonia — they can create big headaches. They have a terrible tendency to build their huge stick nests atop utility poles, creating all sorts of costly problems.

The encouraging news is that just as the birds have adapted to North Jersey, perhaps — just perhaps — we may be learning how to adapt to them.

The latest monk parakeet headlines and headaches arrived earlier this month. First, a work crew hired by Edgewater had to remove several trees where the birds nest so they could repair a retaining wall.

As Scott Fallon reported in The Record, "That ruffled the feathers of some bird-loving residents, members of the Edgewater Parrot Society, who … managed to stop the project so they could place nesting platforms in a park nearby."

Days later, another colony was in the news. PSE&G was blaming them for a four-hour power outage for some 3,400 customers — mostly in Leonia, Englewood Cliffs and Teaneck — after a nest on a utility pole blew out a transformer on Fort Lee Road near the entrance to Overpeck County Park in Leonia.

It is probably too soon to see whether the Edgewater parakeets will build their nests on the new platforms, but that strategy worked a couple of years ago in Ridgefield when bridge repairs displaced the colony there.

Ideally, the nesting-platform approach could work in Leonia as well. A spokeswoman for the utility was not optimistic.

"We don't believe nesting platforms would necessarily prevent the type of outages that we saw [in Leonia]," said PSE&G's Kristine Snodgrass. "It appears one reason the parakeets tend to build around our facilities is because equipment such as transformers, capacitor banks and conductors generate heat due to electrical loads."

Maybe, but Leonia or Bergen County government might give the platforms a try on public land near the utility's right of way. It sure beats the current situation.

The building of nesting boxes to help a species is nothing new around here. As thousands of trees were lost to suburban development in the past couple decades, folks started building nest boxes for displaced birds to nest in. The two best examples are tree swallows and wood ducks, both of which have adapted nicely.

Let's hope monk parakeets can adapt as well. These exotic tropical birds, with their bright green feathers, are stunning — albeit noisy — and watching them fly around in a North Jersey snow flurry is one of the most incongruous sights of winter.

So, in the spirit of the season: Peace on Earth, goodwill toward birds (especially if they learn not to nest on utility poles).