(jazz music)
- New York's a tough city to live in.
It always has been.
Wait, see if we can hear them.
The old saying "If you can make it here,
"you can make it anywhere."
I think because the birds have made it here.
I mean, they've endured this far.
(birds calling)
My name is Steve Baldwin,
and I've been tracking the wild parrots of Brooklyn
for about 10 years now.
Those two look sort of frisky.
It's not really their mating season, but.
Myiopsitta monachus.
(birds screeching)
The monk parakeet.
Native to Argentina.
And as far as we know,
something happened at Kennedy Airport in 1967
or 1968.
It appears that a crate full of parrots
arrived from Argentina.
Something went wrong, a bunch of them escaped.
They came to Brooklyn College, right here.
We’ve got an incredible cast of parrots here today.
One, two, three, four.
They're smaller than a pigeon, but larger than a sparrow.
They're the only kind of parrots
that build these free-standing structures.
These nests can get up to the size of small cars.
It's methodical work, it's twig after twig after twig.
Parrots are sort of the primates of the bird world.
They're smart; they're communicative;
they eat almost anything that's available to them.
So they're perfectly set up, really,
to thrive in a place like Brooklyn,
even though it's not where they came from.
They've adapted extremely well.
You have to, I think, have a certain fiber of steel
to make it in this town,
and I think the parrots have those qualities.
(upbeat music) (parrots twittering)