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.”

 

British Law Used to Shush Scandal Has Become One

They were not listening for the announcers, or even the score. Instead, as one of the journalists recounted, they were listening to the chanting crowd, hoping it would sing en masse about the extramarital affair of one of the players on the field.

The reporters knew that the player, married and among Britain’s most famous, had had an affair with a television personality. But the player has taken out a so-called super injunction — a stringent British legal measure that prevents newspapers from publishing a story on the topic, or even from making any mention that a court order has been granted.

The injunctions, intended to protect privacy, have become a scandal here in Britain. The BBC political editor Andrew Marr, who often grills Britain’s most prominent politicians on the Sunday show that bears his name, publicly admitted Tuesday that he, too, had used one to hide an affair.

And in recent weeks, the issue of the soccer player’s identity has become a matter of national debate, splashed across front pages and featured on television shows. Super injunctions have also been raised in the Houses of Parliament as an example of a curb on the freedom of the press by activist judges.

But in a world where millions converse on Facebook, Twitter and the like, the law cannot feasibly be enforced online. So the reporters listening to the soccer game were hoping that the boisterous fans of the rival team would have read about the affair on the Internet and then shout or sing the details to ridicule their opponents, providing a circuitous way of covering the story. But they were disappointed.

Britain’s press laws are widely seen as particularly restrictive, so much so that international celebrities and public figures often choose to pursue their libel suits here, in what is frequently referred to as “libel tourism.”

But the super injunctions offer a way of stopping stories before they come out and are frequently served on multiple newspapers to pre-empt any possible publication, said Charlotte Harris, a media lawyer who has represented public figures seeking injunctions and others arguing against them.

The injunctions are so protective of their subjects that only a few cases have been made public: another soccer player, John Terry, the captain of the English team, who was reported to have had an affair with the ex-girlfriend of a teammate; Fred Goodwin, the former chairman of the $40 billion banking group Royal Bank of Scotland, who faced criticism for his lavish payouts; and Trafigura, a multinational commodities company accused of dumping toxic waste in Africa.

Details of other cases may become well known within the media community, and rumors from other sources may even spread online, but once a super injunction is served news organizations must keep their readers in the dark. The injunctions take “a matter of hours” in private meetings between judges and lawyers, said Ms. Harris, the media lawyer. And though their secretive nature makes it hard to verify a precise number, reports in the British press suggest that as many as 30 super injunctions may have been granted to other prominent figures.

“The rich and powerful,” said Ian Hislop, the editor of the magazine Private Eye, a satirical weekly that often reports on the hypocrisies of Britain’s elite, “are increasingly turning to these orders.”

“They used at least to have to argue that something you’d printed was not true,” Mr. Hislop said referring to Britain’s strong libel laws, widely held to favor those bringing claims. “Now it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. They can suppress it with a super injunction and call it privacy.”

Private Eye had mounted a legal challenge to Mr. Marr’s super injunction last week, days before he admitted to the court order. Through a BBC spokesman, Mr. Marr declined to comment.

But speaking of his injunction, granted in 2008, he told the Daily Mail that he “did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes. But at the time there was a crisis in my marriage,” he said, adding that he was also concerned about protecting the young child of the woman with whom he had had the affair.

“I know these injunctions are controversial,” he said, “and the situation seems to be running out of control.”

The controversy first surfaced in 2009, when Trafigura obtained a super injunction against journalists who had obtained internal documents discussing the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast. The documents, the company’s lawyers Carter-Ruck argued and the judge agreed, were private material.

The order was eventually overturned when a British member of Parliament tabled a question on the issue, using a centuries-old precedent known as privilege, which holds reporting on Parliament above the law. Later, WikiLeaks also published the document.

And last month another member of Parliament, John Hemming, also used Parliamentary privilege to reveal that Mr. Goodwin, the former chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, “has obtained a super injunction preventing him being identified as a banker.”

“Will the government,” Mr. Hemming asked, “have a debate or a statement on the issue of freedom of speech and whether there is one law for the rich, such as Fred Goodwin, and another law for the poor?”

Ms. Harris, the media lawyer, argued that “this is so much wider and more important than the rich and powerful protecting themselves.” Tabloid newspapers, she said, were using freedom of speech as a pretext to publish stories that were sometimes spurious.

Behind many of the injunctions she has worked on, she said, lies a seamy world of betrayals and tabloid bidding wars for kiss-and-tell tales, “not to mention blackmail and harassment of some of these people.”

“If you’re a public figure and a fan you’ve exchanged a few e-mails with suddenly tells you that she is going to ruin your career, that she’ll turn up at your kids’ school, or go to the press and make accusations, what can you do?” Ms. Harris continued.

“Instead of hysteria we need a proper debate on this,” she said. “What exactly is private and what exactly is not private?”

Mr. Hislop agrees that a debate is essential, and added that to ban publication in the age of the Internet, when many of the recipients of super injunctions can be revealed with a little careful searching online, is “bizarre; it’s ludicrous.”

“I suppose those of us in print should be flattered,” Mr. Hislop said, “that only dead-wood publications count for these judges.”