Speaker 1: Pushkin the Last Archive, a history of Truth.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen fifties, Americans started getting really into exotic birds.
Speaker 3: We sincerely hope this record will be helpful in teaching
Speaker 3: your parakeet to talk.
Speaker 2: Think tiki bars, pink flamingos, Hawaiian shirts, pet parakeets.
Speaker 3: Remember that your bird is an imitator and learns to
Speaker 3: talk by listening to what you say, not only words
Speaker 3: and sounds, but inflection.
Speaker 2: The birds started flooding into the country sold as pets
Speaker 2: from South America to North In the US, they were
Speaker 2: exotic talking birds. In Argentina, they were an agricultural pest,
Speaker 2: so it was a no brainer, no problem.
Speaker 3: During the first year, your bird should learn from fifty
Speaker 3: to one hundred words and phrases. Always be jettle with
Speaker 3: your parakeet.
Speaker 4: He is a.
Speaker 3: Baby, so treat him like one. Don't say hello Peter,
Speaker 3: say hello Peter.
Speaker 2: The parakeet trade really picked up in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: More than sixty thousand parakeets were imported to North America
Speaker 2: in just three years, But a lot of parakeet buyers
Speaker 2: didn't realize just how much personality they were getting with
Speaker 2: these birds. It was funny at first, that they could talk,
Speaker 2: but then kind of annoying, so people started to set
Speaker 2: their birds loose open the window. Goodbye, Peter. It was
Speaker 2: just a few at first, but then more and more
Speaker 2: and more. Supposedly a shipping crate full of parakeets broke
Speaker 2: open at JFK Airport in nineteen sixty nine and unleashed
Speaker 2: a whole bunch into the wild accident fosters. But certainly
Speaker 2: these South American birds couldn't make it through a New
Speaker 2: York City winter. Nobody made much of it until one
Speaker 2: day in nineteen seventy one, a woman went for a
Speaker 2: walk in a park on Long Island. She saw something
Speaker 2: strange in the grass, a spot of bright green. A
Speaker 2: baby parakeet. Wait a parakeet on Long Island. She called
Speaker 2: the American Museum of Natural History and they sent an
Speaker 2: ornithologist out to the scene. He identified the bird monk parakeet.
Speaker 2: Then he looked up and saw twenty five feet above
Speaker 2: him a nest of twigs in a tree. South American
Speaker 2: parakeets were reproducing in New York State. Peter, Welcome to
Speaker 2: the Last Archive, the show about how we know what
Speaker 2: we know, how we used to know things, and why
Speaker 2: it seems sometimes lately as if we don't know anything
Speaker 2: at all. I'm Ben mat of Haffrey today on the
Speaker 2: show Parakeet Panic. When monk parakeets began to reproduce in
Speaker 2: the United States in the nineteen seventies, people freaked out.
Speaker 2: They thought this bird's population would explode and devastate our
Speaker 2: economy and agriculture. But as you have no doubt noticed,
Speaker 2: we do not live in a post parakeet wasteland. So
Speaker 2: why the panic. I'm glad you asked, because I am
Speaker 2: obsessed with these birds, not just because they're hilarious, but
Speaker 2: because they tell a forgotten story about the founding years
Speaker 2: of the environmental movement and raise a big question about
Speaker 2: the human place in the natural world. Are we a
Speaker 2: species like any other or something entirely different. The early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies saw the first Earth Day of the Environmental
Speaker 2: Protection Agency. These things, and a whole lot more happened
Speaker 2: because people had come to realize that they were destroying
Speaker 2: the planet. There were rivers catching fire litter everywhere, early
Speaker 2: signs that the temperature was rising. So tropical birds living
Speaker 2: in the Big Apple so far away from where they
Speaker 2: were supposed to live, It just seemed not great humans
Speaker 2: playing with nature. Everybody knows the story about DDT and
Speaker 2: the EPA and Earth Day, but only bird nuts like
Speaker 2: myself know the story about the parakeets. It's obviously not
Speaker 2: on the same scale, and yet it's a glimpse of
Speaker 2: something important hidden in that early environmental movement. And also
Speaker 2: it's just really funny. Monk parakeets are about the size
Speaker 2: of mourning doves or your average sidewalk pigeon, except they're
Speaker 2: bright green with blue wingtips, white bellies, and hooked beaks.
Speaker 2: They're impossible to miss. They're beautiful, gregarious, loud, and incredibly obnoxious.
Speaker 2: Like all parrots, they have a special relationship with humans.
Speaker 5: Birds have been transported around the world for one reason
Speaker 5: or another for two and a half thousand years.
Speaker 2: Stephen prut Jones is a professor of ecology at the
Speaker 2: University of Chicago. He's emeritus now, but he spent decades
Speaker 2: of his career studying monk parakeets, especially the ones that
Speaker 2: wound up in cities across the United States. He zoomed
Speaker 2: into our interview from his basement, wearing a red beanie
Speaker 2: like Jacques Cousteau. Jacques Cousteau, but for parakeets.
Speaker 5: The first record of the rose ringed parakeet being taken
Speaker 5: from Africa to Greece was five hundred BC.
Speaker 2: Approximately Parrots, as you may know, can mimic human speech.
Speaker 2: This has been the source of a lot of fascination
Speaker 2: and weirdness for a very long time. Ancient and medieval
Speaker 2: literature is full of parrots being mistaken for humans, parrots
Speaker 2: helping King Arthur find love, or singing the praises of Caesar,
Speaker 2: or engaging in deep conversation with the Pope. One origin
Speaker 2: story about parrots has it that the grandson of Prometheus,
Speaker 2: the guy who created people out of clay, begged the
Speaker 2: gods to take him out of the human world, and
Speaker 2: so they turned him into a bright green bird. The
Speaker 2: first scientific account of a parrot was Aristotle's History of Animals,
Speaker 2: where he described them as human tongued and noted that
Speaker 2: they become even more outrageous after drinking wine. That's kind
Speaker 2: of been the score on parrots ever since. People are
Speaker 2: enchanted by them and then completely annoyed by them.
Speaker 5: So it's been a bit of a roller coaster. And
Speaker 5: in Argentina there was a bounty put on them, and
Speaker 5: you could go out and kill them, and you'd get
Speaker 5: some amount of money for a pair of legs if
Speaker 5: you brought them in. And I was even told that
Speaker 5: if you were a rancher or a farmer in Argentina
Speaker 5: and you had monk parakeets nesting on your property, you
Speaker 5: were required by a lot of kill them. So there
Speaker 5: was a huge effort to control population numbers.
Speaker 2: In parts of South America, monk parakeets were just called
Speaker 2: la plaga the plague, because reportedly they'd eat up all
Speaker 2: the crops and party all the time in their huge nests.
Speaker 2: But they were pretty, and maybe the part about them
Speaker 2: being outrageously destructive and annoying got lost in translation, because,
Speaker 2: like I said, tens of thousands of them were sold
Speaker 2: to Americans who were intrigued for a moment and then
Speaker 2: soon thought what have I done. There's this kind of
Speaker 2: constant push pull between fascination with the bird and sort
Speaker 2: of hatred of the bird, for you know, parroting is
Speaker 2: a negative term, and I know one of the thoughts
Speaker 2: is that pet owners might have been releasing parakeets because
Speaker 2: they're such loud, rambunctious creatures that they didn't know what
Speaker 2: they were getting into when they bought them.
Speaker 5: I'm sure that's the case. If a pair of amongk
Speaker 5: parakeets cost somebody one hundred dollars and it was ruining
Speaker 5: their life because of loud noise and refusing to learn,
Speaker 5: you know, to mimic human speech, that's something else entirely.
Speaker 5: So when these birds were seen around the United States
Speaker 5: in the late sixties, was that they were going to
Speaker 5: become a huge agricultural past.
Speaker 2: By the time the ornithologists who spotted the parakeet and
Speaker 2: nests back in Long Island brought word to New York City,
Speaker 2: the government was already doing its own bird watching. That
Speaker 2: spring May nineteen seventy one, the US Fish and Wildlife
Speaker 2: Service put out a pamphlet.
Speaker 6: Some exotic plants and animals are extensively useful to man.
Speaker 6: Others cause great damage or serious inconvenience. The monk parakeet
Speaker 6: is such a bird.
Speaker 2: This episode draws heavily from a seven hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: three page archival file I found in the New York
Speaker 2: State Archives, which is page for page some of the
Speaker 2: funniest reading I have ever done. But the last archive
Speaker 2: is not a major emotion picture. This is not an
Speaker 2: ensemble cast. So every time you hear this guy.
Speaker 6: Some of these birds have evidently escaped or been liberated.
Speaker 2: It's the voice of the US government, and they're pretty upset.
Speaker 6: If this species should become abundant, serious damage to agricultural
Speaker 6: and orchard crops can be expected. Common sense clearly indicates
Speaker 6: that this potential pest should be eliminated in the wild
Speaker 6: and its further importation.
Speaker 2: Prohibited Code red. This is not the time for your
Speaker 2: frivolous bird watching. The parakeets are spreading and the government
Speaker 2: wants to kill every last one to avert near certain disaster.
Speaker 2: It was like a trailer for an apocalyptic ego thriller.
Speaker 7: In a world where there's no food, where mankind has
Speaker 7: been wiped down by whatever diseased parokeet to carry, the
Speaker 7: last man faces down his greatest enemy, the monk parakeet.
Speaker 5: And rightly or wrongly, that was the initial idea. We
Speaker 5: should go out and remove them all, or we should
Speaker 5: go out and kill them, because we don't want them
Speaker 5: to become another news starling.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, the starling situation. Starlings are a bird that
Speaker 2: always comes up when people talk about the dangers of
Speaker 2: invasive species. Here's how the story goes. In eighteen ninety,
Speaker 2: a German immigrant named Eugene Sheeflin wanted to bring birds
Speaker 2: from Europe to the New World so other European immigrants
Speaker 2: would feel more at home. Also, he was supposedly a
Speaker 2: shakespeare nut, and he wanted to make it so that
Speaker 2: every bird mentioned in Shakespeare would live in the wild
Speaker 2: in North America. The logic of this is kind of
Speaker 2: hard to follow. Like you drop a bit of your
Speaker 2: sandwich in the park, get mobbed by starlings, and remember
Speaker 2: that you've never read Henry the Fourth. I don't know Eugene. Also,
Speaker 2: there is only one mention of Starling's in all of Shakespeare,
Speaker 2: and not a very important one. But that didn't stop
Speaker 2: Eugene from taking sixty of the birds out to Central
Speaker 2: Park in March of eighteen ninety, where he unleashed them
Speaker 2: into the wild, setting in motion and infestation that has
Speaker 2: since grown to several hundred hundred million birds across the US,
Speaker 2: doing about eight hundred million dollars in agricultural damage per year.
Speaker 2: That was the Starling situation, or so the story goes,
Speaker 2: an example of just how destructive introduced species can be,
Speaker 2: and so when the monk parakeet showed up in the
Speaker 2: United States. In New York, State officials were dead set
Speaker 2: never again.
Speaker 8: Wanted information relating to escaped alien.
Speaker 2: There are even wanted posters if you.
Speaker 8: See this bird, please report your observation.
Speaker 2: In the spring and summer of nineteen seventy two, there
Speaker 2: was a flurry of meetings in New York. The Audubon Society,
Speaker 2: the Museum of Natural History, the Sierra Club, all of
Speaker 2: them got together to pour over what information existed on
Speaker 2: the monk parakeet and rally around the cause of killing
Speaker 2: every last one. They put out an article in the
Speaker 2: July issue of the Conservationist magazine. There were ads in
Speaker 2: newspapers and on the race sounding the alarm asking people
Speaker 2: to write into the state if they'd seen one of
Speaker 2: the birds in the wild. Some people had actually managed
Speaker 2: to catch the birds and wrote wondering if now that
Speaker 2: meant they had to kill them. Here's a letter that
Speaker 2: I found in the state archives from one tri State
Speaker 2: mom in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 8: In December of seventy two, my son ne died a
Speaker 8: parrot in our backyard.
Speaker 9: At first we thought it was someone's pet because it
Speaker 9: was very cold, below ten, and we were afraid it
Speaker 9: would die.
Speaker 8: However, the parrot lived and it is doing very well.
Speaker 2: We planned to keep the bird for a while anyhow,
Speaker 2: as my son is very interested in him.
Speaker 8: Then he has no trouble.
Speaker 2: I got curious about these stories, and so I tried
Speaker 2: to track some of the families down to see what
Speaker 2: it actually happened with the recaptured birds.
Speaker 10: What the heck was that is? Where did you find it?
Speaker 2: This is the kid from the letter, John Sime, the
Speaker 2: one who needed the parakeet. He's sixty six and living
Speaker 2: in North Carolina. Now, I looked up the address on
Speaker 2: the envelope his mom sent into the archives. Found his brother,
Speaker 2: got John's number and called him up Department of Parakeet Investigations,
Speaker 2: and I was like.
Speaker 10: Wow, that's amazing. There's a parrot in our back gud.
Speaker 10: I just figured he was gonna die because it was
Speaker 10: it was really cold. I said, I got a crabin
Speaker 10: net down the basement. So I went down the basement
Speaker 10: and I got the crabin neet. Oh no, get real
Speaker 10: close to him, and he was a nasty sucker. He
Speaker 10: was trying to bite through the net. If we reached torn.
Speaker 10: He tried to bite it us. I named him Jackson
Speaker 10: because the expression in the seventies was no way Jackson.
Speaker 10: And as I was running after him with the crabinet,
Speaker 10: I said, no way, Jackson. Did you getting away this time?
Speaker 4: Wait?
Speaker 9: What are you I saying?
Speaker 2: I've never heard of saying no way Jackson?
Speaker 10: No way Jackson, which means and that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2: John got the bird inside. Eventually they got a cage
Speaker 2: and some chicken wire for outside, and the bird warmed
Speaker 2: up to them.
Speaker 10: He got to be one of the family. I took
Speaker 10: a cassette tape and made a loop out of it,
Speaker 10: my sister staying Hi, and he learned to say hi.
Speaker 10: But he was You couldn't handle him. If you reached
Speaker 10: in the cage, he was going to try and bite you.
Speaker 10: My dad had an organ in the house and he
Speaker 10: used to play the organ, and when he would play
Speaker 10: the organ, that bird would go absolutely nuts, saying you
Speaker 10: would dance. He would hang upside down. The doorbell would ring,
Speaker 10: and before the dog would start barking, the bird would
Speaker 10: start go. He'd make this real low, gravelly sound. If
Speaker 10: we were messing around in the house and everybody started laughing,
Speaker 10: the bird would laugh like my mom.
Speaker 2: The bird lived with the family for about ten years.
Speaker 2: Sim is pretty sure Jackson actually wasn't among parakeet at all,
Speaker 2: just some other kind of parrot that had gotten out,
Speaker 2: and much the same way as the parakeets did. Someone
Speaker 2: just threw it away. That's why this is to me
Speaker 2: a kind of parable for the problems the environmental movement
Speaker 2: was trying to solve. This was a living creature that
Speaker 2: we treated like track, and then that set in motion
Speaker 2: a whole chain of events that threatened to throw our
Speaker 2: civilization totally out of whack. And then what was our response?
Speaker 2: Kill them all? Officials gathered up the data, they set
Speaker 2: in motion a plan to track down each of the
Speaker 2: birds reported in the letters, all the nests and all
Speaker 2: the good apple eating spots, to prepare for a showdown,
Speaker 2: one big push to kill every last monk parakeet in
Speaker 2: the United States. The hunt begins after the break. In
Speaker 2: April of nineteen seventy three, the campaign to eradicate the
Speaker 2: monk parakeet began. In a front page story The New
Speaker 2: York Times reported that agents of the newly formed Department
Speaker 2: of Environmental Conservation and the US Fish and Wildlife Services
Speaker 2: would move against the birds by means of live trapping,
Speaker 2: use of steel traps, toxic materials to cyanide gas devices
Speaker 2: to electrocute the birds, and caponization, by which they meant neutering.
Speaker 6: The eradication is a large undertake. It indicates that there
Speaker 6: are some four hundred to six hundred monk parakeets in
Speaker 6: New York. It indicates that these birds are located in
Speaker 6: some thirty four known locations in eleven other states. A
Speaker 6: realistic appraisal must recognize that birds conceivably could be existing
Speaker 6: in anywhere from two to probably an excess of ten
Speaker 6: times the number of known locations.
Speaker 2: The time to act was yesterday.
Speaker 6: Tens of thousands of mandays must be rapidly mobilized. It
Speaker 6: must be taken into account that the population at hundreds
Speaker 6: of known and unknown locations will be reproducing, and that
Speaker 6: a doubling of the existing population could be occurring every second, third,
Speaker 6: or fourth year.
Speaker 2: For public relations purposes, they described with they were doing
Speaker 2: as retrieval rather than eradication. The agents, a core crew
Speaker 2: of six with over seventy additional staff available, set out
Speaker 2: into the field to run down the tips and find
Speaker 2: the birds to kill before they spread wildly out of
Speaker 2: control and ate up all our food. Problem was these
Speaker 2: birds are quite intelligent.
Speaker 11: So it's really hard for example, to go out and
Speaker 11: catch birds in the same way, you know, two days
Speaker 11: in a row, two weeks in a row, even two
Speaker 11: months in a row.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Hobson runs a lab at the University of Cincinnati
Speaker 2: that studies how birds think. She's made a bunch of
Speaker 2: studies of monk parakeets because it turns out they're really
Speaker 2: smart because.
Speaker 11: They've seen a trap and they are onto you. So
Speaker 11: that makes it frustrating, and I think that that translates
Speaker 11: over into you know, it's been really hard to figure
Speaker 11: out how to mark them or put any kind of
Speaker 11: trackers on them, because they're really good at chewing things off.
Speaker 1: They're very destructive.
Speaker 11: So I, for example, tried to radio track them by
Speaker 11: putting a tracker on a steel cable wire around their necks,
Speaker 11: and they were able to chew through the steel cable
Speaker 11: wire and if they can't reach it, their buddy can
Speaker 11: reach it and get it off. So they're continually outsmarting us.
Speaker 11: And in the lab we actually joke that sometimes we
Speaker 11: feel like they're getting together at night and plodding how
Speaker 11: to ruin our experiments.
Speaker 2: The state agents ran into the same kind of problems
Speaker 2: killing the birds as Hobson faced studying them. There is
Speaker 2: this whole network of state agents writing to each other
Speaker 2: about the birds, swapping tips, tracking leads. One agent in
Speaker 2: New Jersey wrote to New York to share a lovingly
Speaker 2: detailed sketch of a complicated trap he'd been noodling on,
Speaker 2: involving a tall pole, several s'mores, and a decoy monk.
Speaker 8: Parakeet bull trap not yet tested.
Speaker 2: The guys in the monk parakeet brain Trust remind me
Speaker 2: of nothing so much as wiley coyote trying to catch
Speaker 2: road runner. It's like they're ordering these traps from the
Speaker 2: Act Corporation, and they keep blowing up in their faces,
Speaker 2: rocketing them into dangling rocks, or sending them hurtling onto
Speaker 2: canyon floors.
Speaker 6: Dear mister Buono, we have received a report of large
Speaker 6: numbers of monk parakeets on Riker's Island.
Speaker 2: Early in the campaign, the guys at HQ got a
Speaker 2: note from an NYC corrections officer at the infamous jail
Speaker 2: on an island in the East River. He said one
Speaker 2: day he was walking around on patrol and noticed inmates
Speaker 2: throwing bread out the window to a hungry parrot. This
Speaker 2: struck him as strange, so he asked around and learned
Speaker 2: from an inmate that there were one hundreds more parakeets
Speaker 2: in an abandoned house on the island. He called for reinforcements.
Speaker 2: It took the boys at HQ about a year to
Speaker 2: get cleared to come to the island, and they got
Speaker 2: there on two conditions, no guns and no women. So
Speaker 2: ten guys from Fish and Wildlife sailed out to the island,
Speaker 2: presumably with a bunch of nets to chase the birds
Speaker 2: around for a bit and work up a sweat. But
Speaker 2: monk parakeets move fout faster than state bureaucracy, so by
Speaker 2: the time they got there, the birds had moved on.
Speaker 2: As the birds reproduced and spread, the state seemed to
Speaker 2: miss the fact that the worst effects they'd predicted weren't
Speaker 2: coming to pass. The parakeet population wasn't exploding, There wasn't
Speaker 2: really any evidence of agricultural damage. There were no parasites
Speaker 2: or diseases found in testing, but there were some complaints
Speaker 2: about the raucousness, the absolute nuisance of these birds.
Speaker 11: It's usually on the ground when they're foraging, and then
Speaker 11: kind of a fight breaks out.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Hobson again close scientific associate of the monk.
Speaker 12: Parakeets, And they end up kind of almost like those
Speaker 12: old cartoons, right where there's a dust cloud and there's
Speaker 12: dogs and cats and there's a leg sticking out, though
Speaker 12: there's another leg or a foot or something. And then
Speaker 12: what I'll see in the flight pen is that all
Speaker 12: the other birds that are uninvolved to get very excited.
Speaker 11: They fly down to the ground. They come running over
Speaker 11: and you can see them craning the neck to see
Speaker 11: what's going on.
Speaker 12: And then some birds will jump.
Speaker 9: Into the fight, some will jump.
Speaker 11: Back, and then I'll just calm down, I'll go back
Speaker 11: to foraging. So they are a very feisty species. They
Speaker 11: tend to fight a lot, and they seem to be
Speaker 11: throwing a lot of brain power at these.
Speaker 2: Fights, so they're a loud in cartoonish. But that was
Speaker 2: kind of it. But the main government guy behind the
Speaker 2: parakeet campaign couldn't let it go, just kept pushing it.
Speaker 2: The birds they're still out there. We still need to
Speaker 2: kill them all. Even years later, when just about everyone
Speaker 2: else had moved on his boss sent him a letter
Speaker 2: telling him to give it a rest.
Speaker 6: I find it interesting that you have time to write
Speaker 6: me memos on monk parakeets but cannot find the time
Speaker 6: to complete your reports and make progress on the Wildlife
Speaker 6: Disease Manual. The manual was one of the major justifications
Speaker 6: for creation of the position you now occupy.
Speaker 2: It's hard to predict the future, and introduced species can
Speaker 2: absolutely become real problem. This is true for any number
Speaker 2: of species, including some parakeets. It's not a good thing
Speaker 2: that these birds are reproducing in new places. But what
Speaker 2: I'm interested in is how the response seemed to get
Speaker 2: a little outsized. It was like the guys trying to
Speaker 2: eradicate the parakeets at some point when all captain a
Speaker 2: have in the Great White whale. They so overshot the mark.
Speaker 2: And these were smart people, So why what was really
Speaker 2: going on here in New York? You've got the panic
Speaker 2: about monk parakeet population, but elsewhere at the same time,
Speaker 2: what a lot of environmentalists were really worried about was
Speaker 2: human overpopulation. And it turns out that's always been lurking
Speaker 2: in the background of invasive species panics. So let's take
Speaker 2: another look at the starlink situation. A couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: a paper came out in Duke's Journal of Environmental Humanities
Speaker 2: that took a hard look at that story and how
Speaker 2: it emerged over time. To recap the big points, Shakespeare
Speaker 2: nutt starts infestation of birds that does eight hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars in damage a year. The thing is, though, it
Speaker 2: turns out that basically nothing in that sentence is true.
Speaker 2: Eugene Chieflin wasn't the first person to introduce the starlings
Speaker 2: in the US. He wasn't even a Shakespeare nut And
Speaker 2: the eight hundred million dollars in damage, that number comes
Speaker 2: from a study that blames human agricultural practices for the damage,
Speaker 2: not starlings. It just got said once and then everyone
Speaker 2: went around parroting it. That story got told in a
Speaker 2: big way right around when the parakeet eradication campaign was happening.
Speaker 2: Different bird, same story, same moral. Back in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: that starling guy was in actuality the chair of something
Speaker 2: called the American Acclimatization Society. Acclimatization societies were influenced by
Speaker 2: the theories of Thomas Malthus, the famous economist who thought
Speaker 2: human population would explode and cause first famine and then
Speaker 2: mass death. The acclimatization people figured introducing exotic species and
Speaker 2: new environment could help save the day, maybe by improving
Speaker 2: domestic agriculture or just being a new thing people could eat.
Speaker 2: They brought zebras and kangaroos to Paris and Chinese sheep
Speaker 2: to London. That was the early history of invasive species,
Speaker 2: intentionally introduced, among other reasons, to feed a human population
Speaker 2: that seemed to be growing out of control. Over the
Speaker 2: course of the twentieth century, ecologists and animal scientists kept
Speaker 2: studying the way animal populations worked booms and busts. They
Speaker 2: wanted to quantify that pattern, which meant you could predict
Speaker 2: it too. The thing is, those ideas didn't stay limited
Speaker 2: to animal scientists. William Vote, an ornithologist, published a hugely
Speaker 2: popular book called Road to Survival in nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 2: warning about human overpopulation, a similar kind of boom bust cycle,
Speaker 2: just with us, not animals. By the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: that idea that human populations works floating like animal populations.
Speaker 2: It was everywhere, not like academic quibbling, but an issue
Speaker 2: discussed in the news and on television, like in this
Speaker 2: interview with the biologist Paul Erlick.
Speaker 7: Doctor Erlick, when did the thought first come to you
Speaker 7: that perhaps our time as mankind and earth was limited?
Speaker 4: Oh, came in nineteen forty nine when I read a
Speaker 4: book by William Vote called Road to Survival.
Speaker 2: Almost twenty years after he read that book, Paul Erlick
Speaker 2: wrote his own incredibly popular book called The Population Bomb.
Speaker 2: He predicted there'd be mass death from starvation because there
Speaker 2: were just too many people. This was not at all
Speaker 2: a fringe idea. Eric went on The Tonight Show with
Speaker 2: Johnny Carson eighteen times.
Speaker 4: The only hope that there is is that we will
Speaker 4: be able, at least in the United States, through the
Speaker 4: political process, to get a government that's courageous enough to say, look,
Speaker 4: we're overpopulated and we have to have population control and
Speaker 4: start moving in that direction.
Speaker 2: He spoke all over the world. He was one of
Speaker 2: eight people on the steering for the first Earth Day
Speaker 2: in April nineteen seventy, and human population growth was a
Speaker 2: major concern of the event. That activism led to a
Speaker 2: bunch of influential environmental laws. But Earth Day also came
Speaker 2: just two months before the first National Congress on Optimum
Speaker 2: Population and Environment. That same year, six months after Earth Day,
Speaker 2: Congress created the Office of Population Affairs to work on
Speaker 2: human population control in the United States. And in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, the year the panic about the monk parakeet
Speaker 2: was heating up, one of the best selling books in
Speaker 2: the world was called The Limits to Growth, another thing
Speaker 2: about uncontrolled growth. It was a huge media moment. The
Speaker 2: tape I'm about to play you is from a spooky
Speaker 2: documentary made about it. It's like every stock image of
Speaker 2: a smokestack, traffic jam, or smoggy city scape. This movie's
Speaker 2: got it.
Speaker 3: Our riches and our numbers burdened the world.
Speaker 2: Limits was a huge deal. It was a scientific report
Speaker 2: issued by a mysterious organization of academics, statesmen, and businessmen.
Speaker 2: They worked with a supercomputer at MIT that ran a
Speaker 2: program tracking major trends in five key aspects of the
Speaker 2: global economy, natural resources, agriculture, pollution, industrialization, and human population.
Speaker 2: They laid out the base case in the documentary. They
Speaker 2: used the.
Speaker 3: Computer to see what would happen if man successfully tackled
Speaker 3: his obvious problems.
Speaker 6: But first they ran the computer to see what direction
Speaker 6: the world would take if it ran its present course.
Speaker 2: The prediction nothing good. Population grows and so does agriculture
Speaker 2: in industry, but then that big population uses up all
Speaker 2: the resources, and without resources, industry collapses, which leads to
Speaker 2: a kind of doom loop within farming and then food,
Speaker 2: so everybody dies off. If you've ever played SimCity or
Speaker 2: roller coaster Tycoon, the Limits to Growth is basically that
Speaker 2: feeling when the doom loop starts and all you can
Speaker 2: do is watch your city or your roller coaster go
Speaker 2: careening off the tracks. Now, unfortunately for them, in nearly
Speaker 2: all their models, civilization just kept collapsing. Not great. Also,
Speaker 2: The Limits to Growth was outsold in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 2: by a book called The Joy of Sex, which kind
Speaker 2: of sums the whole thing up. By the next year,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three, a movie called Soilent Green was in theaters,
Speaker 2: and it literally opens with the documentary montage of overpopulation
Speaker 2: and pollution, and then it gives a log line the
Speaker 2: year twenty twenty two, the place New York City, the
Speaker 2: population forty million people. There isn't enough food for everyone,
Speaker 2: so they're reading these cracker things called Soilent Green.
Speaker 6: A new delicious soilent green.
Speaker 12: The miracle food of high energy is plankton gathered from
Speaker 12: the oceans of the work.
Speaker 2: Now, no spoilers, but soilent green is not made of plankton,
Speaker 2: and it has a lot to do with the overpopulation problem. Okay, fine,
Speaker 2: here's a spoiler.
Speaker 8: Silent breed is paper.
Speaker 2: So all this is the backdrop to the parakeet retrieval campaign,
Speaker 2: and I actually think this was a really damaging thing
Speaker 2: for the environmental movement. Too many people is not the problem.
Speaker 2: The problem is the system. Those people work within, the
Speaker 2: polluting tools they're given, what big companies do with the
Speaker 2: money those people spend. But the population control evangelists and
Speaker 2: the environmental movement came together right at that same parakeet
Speaker 2: moment in the nineteen seventies. The fear about the parakeets,
Speaker 2: it was just another fear about uncontrolled population growth, like
Speaker 2: soilent green or the limits to growth, just for parakeets,
Speaker 2: the bird that takes whatever we say and repeats it
Speaker 2: right back.
Speaker 1: I sheltered.
Speaker 8: I still time too.
Speaker 2: The retrieval program began to wind down in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: Mission accomplished the birds in New York State, seemed to
Speaker 2: be almost entirely wiped out. Some of the officials took
Speaker 2: a victory lap wrote up a draft of a paper
Speaker 2: about how they'd killed off the invasive population for a
Speaker 2: conference in New Jersey.
Speaker 6: Today, with the exception of an estimated nine to ten
Speaker 6: birds at large.
Speaker 8: This problem has been solved.
Speaker 6: If this species becomes established in this country, it will
Speaker 6: not be from New York.
Speaker 2: Stock On that draft in the state archives you can
Speaker 2: see penciled in notes from another state official after nine
Speaker 2: to ten birds at large, he wrote, which we also
Speaker 2: intend to get and to the sentence this problem has
Speaker 2: been solved, they added one word.
Speaker 9: Apparently, my function is sort of like the pr guy
Speaker 9: for the pirates, because there is a lot of negative
Speaker 9: press about them. They're invasive, they hate robins, they're messy,
Speaker 9: they they don't respect us and.
Speaker 2: All they hate robins.
Speaker 9: No, no, that's a lie, this is propaganda.
Speaker 2: A couple weeks before Christmas twenty twenty two, I went
Speaker 2: to the largest cemetery in Brooklyn with a man named
Speaker 2: Steve Baldwin. He runs a website called Brooklyn Parrots, and
Speaker 2: we were there to see the Brooklyn parakeets and to
Speaker 2: talk about how he became the parrot pr Guy. It
Speaker 2: was almost exactly fifty years after the eradication campaign began,
Speaker 2: and the birds, who are supposedly all dead, about forty
Speaker 2: of their descendants were living in one massive nest in
Speaker 2: the cemetery, in the most ostentatious part of the place
Speaker 2: of the main gate. I asked Steve how he'd become
Speaker 2: a bird guy, and he told me a story from
Speaker 2: about twenty years earlier, when he was out of work
Speaker 2: living at his mother in law's place in Yonkers. One
Speaker 2: day he was walking in Central Park with his daughter,
Speaker 2: and then he heard a group of people in the distance, and.
Speaker 9: They were chanting a bunch of things, but I remember
Speaker 9: hearing they were chanting all together, bring back the nest,
Speaker 9: Bring back the nest, Bring back What is this?
Speaker 10: I have to know?
Speaker 2: The group was protesting the eviction of a hawk named
Speaker 2: Pale Male. He'd made a nest on a fancy apartment
Speaker 2: building by Central Park. The building had destroyed it, and
Speaker 2: now there were protesters holding vigil in the park. There's
Speaker 2: a term in birding that I love, spark bird, the
Speaker 2: bird that gets you into birds. For me, it was
Speaker 2: a mourning dove who'd roost on our fire escape every
Speaker 2: morning during the first month of the pandemic. For Steve,
Speaker 2: it was that celebrity hawk.
Speaker 5: I mean, I joined the group.
Speaker 9: I came by as much as I could. I had
Speaker 9: like a little crummy temporary job, but I come up
Speaker 9: after work and we chant through the night. It's one
Speaker 9: of the reasons why I left Yonkers, because my mother
Speaker 9: in law saw me on television and said, what the
Speaker 9: hell are you doing with your life?
Speaker 2: He got kicked out, but it was a blessing in
Speaker 2: disguise because Steve, a lifelong New Yorker, had finally found
Speaker 2: his people. He became a bird guy. But after Pale Mail,
Speaker 2: he was looking for another cause. That's when he heard
Speaker 2: about a colony of much malign parakeets living in the
Speaker 2: old soccer field of Brooklyn College.
Speaker 9: And I thought, my goodness, this is strange. And I
Speaker 9: went out there and I was blown away. It's not
Speaker 9: only were there like I thought there might be a handful,
Speaker 9: but there was like a community.
Speaker 2: There were about hundred of them, one hundred words.
Speaker 9: And I said, my God, and I remember, this is
Speaker 9: the transcendental moment. I was out there on the old
Speaker 9: soccer field and I was looking up and the birds
Speaker 9: were all around, and then I could hear the bells
Speaker 9: and I could hear the squawking. I said, this is
Speaker 9: this profound moment of synchronicity in my life, and perhaps.
Speaker 10: I'veound my calling.
Speaker 2: Steve moved to Brooklyn bought a web domain Brooklyn parrots
Speaker 2: dot com. He calls himself the parakeet pr guy because
Speaker 2: after the eradication campaign, the birds had a bad rap.
Speaker 2: They'd reached an uneasy truce with the state and we're
Speaker 2: living mainly in nests in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn College.
Speaker 2: But even though they'd been reproducing in New York for generations,
Speaker 2: they were still thought of as alien invasive. So Steve
Speaker 2: started posting photos of the birds, writing about their comings
Speaker 2: and goings. As interest grew, he started doing monthly parrot
Speaker 2: safaris around Brooklyn, taking people to see the nests. He
Speaker 2: did it for nearly fifteen years until COVID, and even
Speaker 2: then he's still out there all the time.
Speaker 9: You can imagine if you're listening to this or as
Speaker 9: we can see right now, this is a very beautiful
Speaker 9: gay made out of brown stone. It's probably about seventy
Speaker 9: five feet tall. I'm not sure exactly how tall it is.
Speaker 9: But at the top of it you can see that
Speaker 9: looks like it's covered with a kind of a Yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: Just like a sort of like growth of twigs.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it looks almost like a beard that's on top
Speaker 9: of this structure, and we're.
Speaker 2: Like a tupe, like a bad tupeg.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah. And of course that that mass is composed
Speaker 9: of thousands and thousands of individually placed twigs that were
Speaker 9: gathered from the trees in this immediate area and brought
Speaker 9: up individually by by the wild parrots. Other birds build nests,
Speaker 9: they they're not really very well crafted. The mont parakeet
Speaker 9: builds a nest that is exquisitely.
Speaker 2: This thing we're looking at is just elaborate.
Speaker 9: I mean, it's impressive. And although we can't see them
Speaker 9: right now, they're not working. They're not working on the
Speaker 9: nest right now. But when they are working on the nest,
Speaker 9: they seem to be almost obsessive about getting everything right.
Speaker 2: These birds were all descend from the birds brought into
Speaker 2: the country as pets, and now they were living free
Speaker 2: in the city in a colony with little apartments for
Speaker 2: each bird. If you talk to scientists about the parakeets.
Speaker 2: They'll tell you it's hard to generalize between the different
Speaker 2: populations in different places, and between captive and wild, because
Speaker 2: these birds are smart and adaptive. So Steve seemed to
Speaker 2: me like the right guy to ask about how the
Speaker 2: New York birds acted, not only because he gives that
Speaker 2: parakeet safari, but also because he'll tell you he identifies
Speaker 2: with the parakeets. I noticed as he spoke he kept
Speaker 2: looking at me out of the corner of his eye,
Speaker 2: kind of like a parakeet, just in a black windbreaker
Speaker 2: and cap.
Speaker 1: Ah wait, I hear the call of the wild.
Speaker 2: It should be noted that, as you said that, we're
Speaker 2: in a freezing cold cemetery with nobody around.
Speaker 9: Yes, yes, up, they go, two of them going off,
Speaker 9: the dynamic duo heading off to the east. Who knows
Speaker 9: what they're up to, but let's see, they're sort of
Speaker 9: circling around.
Speaker 2: It looks like one of them maybe chasing the other.
Speaker 2: When the cemetery was built in the nineteenth century, there
Speaker 2: was a native parakeet living in the United States, the
Speaker 2: Carolina parakeet. People talk about how introduced species can cause
Speaker 2: native species to go extinct, and that's true, but that's
Speaker 2: also just another way of saying that people drove that
Speaker 2: species extinct. The Carolina parakeet went extinct in the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century in part because people hunted it for its feathers,
Speaker 2: which were popular in hats. Baldwin thinks there's an ecological
Speaker 2: niche left for the monk parakeet because of the killed
Speaker 2: off Carolina one. This is just a strange opportunity to
Speaker 2: right or wrong. Most people in New York have no
Speaker 2: clue that there are parakeets living in the wild here.
Speaker 2: Because the population grew at a reasonable rate. Monk parakeets
Speaker 2: have become the second most widespread parrot in the world,
Speaker 2: and they do cause problems for some people in some
Speaker 2: places Florida, especially because they like to nest in utility
Speaker 2: poles and that can cause power outages. But in terms
Speaker 2: of those initial worries hordes of parakeets marauding across the country,
Speaker 2: decimating our food supply, it just never happened. It's just
Speaker 2: like that spark bird. It's not about the parakeets. It
Speaker 2: was never about the parakeets. It's just that they're the
Speaker 2: thing we notice when the problems people have set in
Speaker 2: motion come home to Roost. The Last Archive is written
Speaker 2: and hosted by Me Ben Nattaphaffrey. It's produced by me
Speaker 2: and Lucy Sullivan and edited by Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky
Speaker 2: is our engineer. Sound design by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan.
Speaker 2: Fact checking on this episode by Arthur Gomperts. Our fool
Speaker 2: Proof players are Becca A. Lewis and Robert Ricotta. Our
Speaker 2: executive producers are Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Thanks also
Speaker 2: to Julia Barton Pushkin Executive Editor. Original music by Matthias
Speaker 2: Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. Many of
Speaker 2: our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior in the
Speaker 2: Stargenette Foundation Special Thanks to Dove Sachs, Grace Smith Vedare,
Speaker 2: and the New York State Archives. For a bibliography, further reading,
Speaker 2: and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode, head
Speaker 2: to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive is
Speaker 2: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
Speaker 2: consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad
Speaker 2: free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month.
Speaker 2: Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 2: at pushkin dot fm, and please sign up for our
Speaker 2: newsletter at pushkin dot fm Slash Newsletter. To find more
Speaker 2: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Nattafhaffrey.