British Parakeet Boom Is a Mystery, and a Mess

Within minutes, hundreds more of the squawking birds — in formations 10, 20, 30 strong — had passed above the tidy homes and a cricket club, whizzing toward their nightly roost.

Individually, any of the rose-ringed parakeets could be the star of a DreamWorks film, electric green with bright pink beaks and the voluble personalities that have long made the tropical species a popular household pet. But for people who frequent the park or live nearby, the visceral experience is more like “The Birds” — albeit with more color and a much noisier soundtrack than the Hitchcock film.

Native to the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, the rose-ringed parakeet is enjoying a population explosion in many London suburbs, turning a once-exotic bird into a notorious pest that awakens children, monopolizes garden bird feeders and might even threaten British crops.

One rough estimate put the population in Britain at 30,000 a few years ago, up from only 1,500 in 1995. Researchers at Imperial College London are now trying a more scientific census through its Project Parakeet, which enlisted volunteer birders around the country for simultaneous counts on a recent Sunday evening.

“I was delighted when I first saw one in my yard, but when you have a flock of 300, it’s a different matter,” said Dick Hayden, a retiree who was volunteering at Long Lane Park. “They eat all the berries. They ate all the food from my feeder in one day; it was ludicrous. I had to stop putting it out because it got too expensive.”

There is wide agreement that the Adams and Eves behind the current population boom did not fly here from Asia or Africa but escaped from British pet cages or were intentionally released by their owners. The great mystery is what allowed the parakeets to procreate with such phenomenal success just in the past decade.

Throughout much of the 20th century, there have been occasional sightings around Britain of escaped parakeets, which are hardy enough to survive the foothills of the Himalayas. But their numbers remained low, and most scientists assumed that they were not adapted well enough to breed readily.

Theories abound. Is it that gardeners are planting more exotic ornamental plants, effectively providing imported food to match an imported bird species? That suburbanites are installing more feeders and putting out more seed? The booming British gardening industry guards sales figures and has provided little guidance.

Alternatively, some scientists suggest that a slightly warmer climate has indeed helped tip the balance, perhaps increasing the parakeet’s metabolism during its February breeding season, bolstering the growth of some of its favored food or killing off a predator.

“Being tropical, they’re used to a milder climate, and they’ve arrived here during a long spell of warm years,” said Grahame Madge, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Yet the parakeets also did fine over the past two winters, which were uncommonly cold.

“The jury’s out,” Mr. Madge said. “I’m not aware of any predators being removed. I’m not aware of any environmental trigger that set this off. I’m not convinced that climate is playing into it.”

Perhaps the answer lies in the numbers game that prevails in any dating venue: once the population passed a certain threshold, it was more likely that each parakeet could find a mate and make a home in the suburbs.

The new bird census may help shed some light on the trend. Scientists, birders and policymakers are “waiting with bated breath for these latest numbers,” said David Leech, senior research ecologist at the British Trust for Ornithology. “It’s absolutely fascinating to have a species come in and proliferate like this; we’ve never seen that before. But we need to know a lot more so we can understand how they’ll spread.”

British officials are watching trends closely since the parakeets have proved major agricultural pests elsewhere, ravaging crops in places like India. So far, they have shown little predilection for leaving Europe’s cities and suburbs for agricultural areas. (Far smaller flocks of rose-ringed parakeets have also arrived in other European cities like Brussels and Amsterdam.)

There is also concern that the wily parakeet will outcompete more restrained British birds like the nuthatch, since both species nest in holes in old trees.

So far British scientists have not documented either problem, said Hannah Peck, a graduate student with Project Parakeet, but they remain watchful.

“I saw one have it in with a jackdaw,” she said, referring to a British crow that is itself no shrinking violet. “The jackdaw lost.”

 

Critic’s Notebook: The Mystery That Won’t Go Away

It is hard to think of another mystery in recent history that has fired the engines of cultural production quite like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager presumed to have been killed during a senior class trip to Aruba in 2005. The case has been the subject of more than a half-dozen nonfiction books (the latest, “Portrait of a Monster: Joran van der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery,” arrives in July), episodes on both “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” uncountable hours of “Nancy Grace” on CNN and an entire subspecies of dramatic programming on Lifetime.

The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.

The real Beth Holloway.

When the story first broke six years ago, the cable-news media received scrutiny for devoting so much time to the disappearance of one pretty, white young woman from an affluent suburb when similar attention was rarely, if ever, paid to the lost, mistreated children of the urban underclass. Lifetime broadcast a movie about the case — titled simply “Natalee Holloway” — in 2009 and set a ratings record for itself. An insidious franchise was born.

“Justice for Natalee Holloway,” to be shown on Monday, is the sequel, and after it comes “Vanished With Beth Holloway,” a new documentary series about the disappeared featuring Natalee’s mother as its host. Tragedy ages most of us, but it seems to have had the opposite effect on Beth Holloway, a special-education teacher who has been a persistent television presence since interest in her harrowing experience swelled.

Exhausted and distinctly middle aged looking when she first emerged, Ms. Holloway is now smoother skinned, sleeker and blonder, as if she had committed to being reborn as a young Deborah Norville. The makeover is the most unsettling thing about the show, because it suggests that Ms. Holloway has embraced her circumstance with a certain Canyon Ranch enthusiasm. It is doubly jarring that Tracy Pollan, who plays her in both of the Lifetime movies, doesn’t look as good as her model.

“Justice for Natalee Holloway” and the first half-hour of “Vanished” devote themselves to excavating the cruelties of Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch student among those last seen with Natalee. Now awaiting trial in the killing of a young woman in Peru, he has offered various versions of his encounter with Natalee in Aruba and then recanted them as lies. Despite Mr. van der Sloot’s untrustworthiness, Ms. Holloway keeps returning to him in hope of honest explanations.

It is not merely that she has lived the reality quietly threatening every mother that makes her a kind of signature Lifetime heroine; she also embodies a maniacal, crusading spirit that rightfully mistrusts law enforcement to get the job done.

Lifetime began as a network devoted to narratives of female suffering — at the hands of adulterous or abusive husbands and all manner of male miscreants. It has since created a fief of mini-niches, one of which lionizes women who operate beyond the bounds of the law to find kidnapped children, missing sisters and so on. In the Lifetime worldview institutions are often objects of suspicion; a psychiatric facility, for example, might commit you for no good reason (“Committed”).

Portraits of brazenness born of desperation are part of the Lifetime mission, and the network seems compelled by the notion that Ms. Holloway has defined her life by her daughter’s absence. She tirelessly pursues the truth. She ventures around the country speaking about the dangers of international travel. She has founded the Natalee Holloway Resource Center to help families of the missing. But what the films suggest, almost accidentally, is that Ms. Holloway perhaps didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought. Natalee might have been more of a rebellious, partying, risk taker — which is to say an average teenager — than her mother had realized.

In the end what is compelling and cautionary about Ms. Holloway’s story is not simply that something terrible happened but that she was too wedded to the idea of her daughter’s straight-A exceptionalism. In her view Natalee was not the kind of girl to allow a boy in a bar to use her belly button as a shot glass and then stumble off with him into the night. At a time when we are expected not only to love and care for our children meticulously but also to befriend them ardently, the prospect of self-delusion is the real horror movie playing in our heads.