Rose-ringed parakeets working in large gangs can quickly eat most of the mangoes on a single tree. The hunters said it was useless for them to return. They hovered high above us, squawking like the were laughing at us.” “When the birds saw the hunters, they would just fly higher and higher up,” she said. Tsuruda says two of her hunter friends offered to shoot the birds but they only managed to kill two in an entire day. Lynn Tsuruda, who owns Frankie’s Nursery in Waimanalo with her husband Frank Sekiya, says the rose-ringed parakeets invade in large gangs, swooping down to wipe out a rambutan tree in a day. Shiels and Nicholas Kalodimos, in an article in the journal Pacific Science, called the birds “strikingly beautiful” but “unwanted invaders.” In Hawaii, they are classified as “injurious wildlife.” They have no effective predators here.Īnecdotal reports of their damage to crops and property on Oahu are numerous. We need to find new strategies to manage this pest before it becomes a widespread problem,” said Jari Sugano, Oahu county administrator of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “They are a significant threat to Oahu’s agriculture industry. The parakeets are reported in Kapiolani Park, Manoa, Waimanalo, Waipio and Mililani. He knows of only one island, Mahe in the Seychelles, where the population of 545 rose-ringed parakeets was successfully exterminated. He says although the birds’ numbers can be reduced on Oahu, population extermination would be challenging. Shiels says, “The level of damage they are doing on Oahu can certainly be reduced through management actions” - such actions could include killing and trapping them. Department of Agriculture, National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, estimated in an email that there are currently about 10,000 rose-ringed parakeets on Oahu and each year their population can be expected to expand by 21% as it has annually for more than a decade. Shiels, a research biologist for the U.S. They are from South Asia and were first sighted on Oahu in the 1930s.Īaron B. They are known as rose-ringed or ring-necked parakeet because of the black and rose-colored feathers around the necks of males. The birds are more like parrots, bigger than the normal-sized parakeets we had for pets as children. There is no active effort to control their growing numbers on Oahu and there does not seem to be the will to initiate any sort of widespread management program here. They spread seeds of invasive plants and could have an adverse effect on native wildlife. They are eating valuable commercial fruit and corn crops, destroying mangoes in residents’ backyards, pooping on cars and disturbing the peace with their noisy chatter. It is one of my pandemic activities, watching the noisy green parakeets while I do weight training by Zoom on our deck.ĭriven by curiosity to find out more about the birds, I discovered there are plenty of reasons we should hate them. At 6:15 on the dot every morning, about 60 rose-ringed parakeets swoop high above my house, screaming and squawking as they circle two or three times before swooping down toward the ocean, and then zooming high up in the sky again before disappearing over the rim of Diamond Head.
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