It's June, Tropical Birds Are Taking Over New York City

Welcome to June. The month when it’s already too hot.

I hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend. I did, pretty much. Although it was too hot. And it was too hot yesterday, too. I know it’s awfully trite to complain about the heat in New York, and how spring is too short in the city. But I’ll do it anyway. It’s too hot and spring is too short in New York City. Spring meaning not the quarter of the calendar, of course, but the fleeting blip of time each year when you can be outside without a coat, but also without a coating of sweat. When you can sleep beneath a sheet, and not a blanket, with the windows open for the breeze. Here we are on the first day of June and I already want to seal up the windows and turn on the air-conditioner. An impulse I fight because it makes me feel sad to turn on the air-conditioner a full twenty days before summer officially starts. I know in some ways, as far as most people think, summer officially started Monday. It’s now okay to wear white pants (sort of, I guess, if you like to ever wear white pants) and to drink gin and tonics. Perhaps with Campari. And I don’t begrudge any season its rightful temperatures. I can appreciate a good summer swelter. Hot at night, the heavy air, saxophone playing from some imaginary fire-escape, barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain and all that. I can get into it.

But in its time. Come July and August, I can accept it. Not now, not in June. Eighty-eight degrees? Too soon. It’s disgusting. The streets shouldn’t smell as bad as they do this early in the year. The summer garbage stink has arrived much, much too soon. And it’s disheartening. Since it’s bound to just be getting hotter and hotter, earlier and earlier every year for the rest of our lives. (Despite whatever freak, record-setting snowfalls we might get in the winter months.)

New York is becoming more tropical. I was reminded of this as I walked across the Manhattan Bridge this weekend. I had been in Brooklyn, and since it was sunny and warm and I could use the exercise, I’d thought, Oh, it will be nice to walk home to Manhattan. (And it’s better to take the Manhattan Bridge at the moment, since the Brooklyn Bridge is all tarped-up and view-obstucted for repairs of some sort.) And it was nice. It was very nice. There was a couple getting married in the circle of grass in the park at the water’s edge in Dumbo. The bride and the groom in their formal attire, the wedding party looking on, cameras and stuff, and right in the middle of all of these other people, just normal New Yorkers, biking or skating or sunbathing around them, enjoying the park for themselves. It was so very public and festive that, viewing the scene from 100 feet above, I actually had the urge to shout down a whoo-hoo and congratulations. I didn’t. I’m not sure whether they would have even heard me. And I obviously, I would have looked like a crazy person, or at least a major dorkball. So I just thought it. But it was a nice thing to see.

Anyway, by the time I was halfway across the bridge, which was being frequently shaken by the subway trains rattling across past me, it was feeling less nice. I was sweaty and tired and sore and aware of the blisters forming on my feet, and thinking about how I would have definitely preferred to be on one of the subway trains at this point and sorry to know that none of them could stop to pick me up. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shock of a color blue that you don’t usually see in the city. I turned to look and saw that this blue — which was the color of a shirt someone gave me once that I never wear because, again, it is just too bright for the city; you see it maybe in the Meatpacking District? I wore the shirt once on vacation, in Mexico, and felt less like a light bulb — this super-bright blue was a patch of feathers on the chest of a small bird perched on the fence in between the walkway and the train tracks. It’s other feathers were also colorful, with stripes and interesting patterns. It was a parakeet, the kind some people call a budgie (short for “budgerigar,” and taken as a name by an early Welsh heavy metal band.)

This type of parakeet comes from Australia, apparently. But is often kept as a pet by people all over the world. So I guessed that it must have escaped from a cage in someone’s apartment, flown out the window (which has probably been since closed; lesson learned, and to keep the air-conditioning in) and arrived here on the Manhattan Bridge.

It fluttered around a bit on the fence, hopping from perch to perch. But it let me get surprisingly close to it, and just clung tight where it was when a train rumbled by and ruffled its feathers. I thought it might be sick, and how sad it would be if this were the end of the line for this beautiful little bird, here on a chain-link fence between Brooklyn and Manhattan, so far away from its natural environment, with subway trains blasting hot wind at it and a sweaty, tired man gawking at it.

But then it took off, launching itself from the fence with a furious flapping of its wings, and swooped down lower than bridge, flying like a bullet southeast over the East River towards Manhattan. To Wall Street, maybe.

It looked healthy, this flash of blue, flying away from me. And I wondered whether it would find a mate, maybe it already had, and start a colony of Manhattan parakeets. Apparently, this has recently happened in London — to deleterious effect.

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.

And there’s already the flock of green quaker parrots that nest amongst the electric generators in the power plant across the street from the Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn. You’d think the babies would be hatching with like extra beaks and third eyes and stuff, or little antlers or antenna, but they’re totally thriving there. (In fact, they’re probably developing super-powers, and will soon be able to cut through supermarket windows with laser claws, and steal all our crackers.) Have you ever been out there to seen them? Squawky, amazing things.

So, yeah. The birds. When they’re not dying en masse

, or drinking themselves into a flightless stupor, they’re taking over. Because of global warming, I think. Speaking of birds, did you read the Jonathan Franzen piece in the Times on Sunday? If not, check it out. It was really good, I thought. That guy really loves birds.