All parrots in Barcelona use their bills like a pair of shears to cut their food. Since around 50 years ago, when they started being exported to America, Western Europe and Russia, tropical parrots have been taking refuge between cornice brackets, nudging themselves beneath bay windows, poking under chimney cowls and swooping down abandoned smokestacks in Chicago, London, Brooklyn, Texas, Oregon and Paris. The romantic, swashbuckling theory is that the parrots escaped from shipping crates at the airport or port. No ornithologist believes they flew here on their own.
Fatigued pet owners, however, are not the only people unenamoured of the parrots. Farmers in the Baix Llobregat complain about the parrots eating their corn and sunflower crops. And monk parakeets in particular, the only species in Barcelona that builds its own nests, have ruffled a few feathers. They like to construct their elaborate twig-nests around heating-emitting transformers atop utility poles, which can cause power outages and fires.
The peregrine falcon, a natural predator of the parrot, was reintroduced into Barcelona in This permit will only be issued if some sort of damage can be demonstrated.
However, as I took a deep breath in preparation, my target flew away into the azure sky. Neither the puzzled stares of passersby nor the quizzical expression of the man in the kiosk made me feel the deserved humiliation. Skip to main content. About Us Distribution Points. Back to Search Results. Photo by Abel Julien. Follow us facebook twitter linkedin pinterest instagram. He was quite cagey about what he did, beyond mentioning that he was semi-retired, and I wondered at first if he was some kind of minor rockstar I ought to know about.
He reminded me of a distant relative who was part of The Scaffold, now best known for Lily the Pink. We chatted for a while about old Clint Eastwood movies and silly hats, and some way down the road he told me he was a psychic medium, and was just returning from a weekend visit to another psychic medium in Dolgellau.
Meet Jimmy the budgie who attacks postmen as they try to deliver mail
I wondered where to take the conversation from here. Some would rate mediums worse than con-men. I come from a sceptic background — my father was not so much a lapsed Catholic as one who was never convinced in the first place. Thanks to Dad and Douglas Adams I grew up as a stout materialist, an agnostic verging on the atheist, and without feeling any particular need for a spiritual dimension in my life.
Then again, I had a lot of friends who believed wholeheartedly in a spiritual dimension; a great admiration for the stories of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, an occultist and a chaos magician respectively, and a determination not to offend my lift.
Not that Joe seemed easily offended — in fact, he was a terrible tease. Or is that kind of thing beneath you?
But I went down to Rhyl, and I met up with her and her husband in a car park — they were spiritualists like me — and they seemed perfectly sane. So I went back to their flat — perfectly ordinary place. What had happened is that her father used to own the budgie until he passed away, maybe a year ago. Maybe a month later, it started saying other things.
Swearing at her, threatening her, telling her she was going to die. When she let it out of its cage it would start pecking her, dive-bombing her, attacking her. I watched a few of the videos, and then I sat down with her and said that there might be an everyday explanation, but it could be that it was a negative spirit that had possessed the budgie and used her affection for her father and her belief in the supernatural as a way in.
Budgies almost win first game - Bermuda Sun
Once it had built up enough trust and affection to mess with her head, it started misbehaving. I jumped about a foot. That pretty much settled it for us both. She asked me what to do with it. Had the father planned the whole thing as a sick joke? Did the budgie learn the language off the TV? Sadly, a quick google search revealed that Katey and Her Possessed Budgie, by Brian Curtin , has already cornered the market in the literature of the avian uncanny. This would be the ideal point to look back, evaluate and reminisce, and such indeed was my original purpose, before I remembered how much I hate writing self-reflexive articles.
I keep a journal for that, now well into its ninth volume, and woe betide he who peruses it without permission! So it is with some delight I have tossed aside my projected plan of discussing the motives that led me to begin blogging, complaining about how much I hate taking photos — the worst part of the blog — and trying to impose a retroactive rationale on a rattlebag of miscellaneous writing that incorporates anecdotes, poetry readings and academic conference reports, on topics as varied as astronomy , wild swimming , flying a glider , the Homeric translations of George Chapman and the embarrassments of taking a tramp home after a beer festival.
Her friend or boyfriend, with similar tattoos and a wild tangle of hair and beard, never spoke.
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I picked the largest, dark, plump and softly bobbled; still my mouth filled with the familiar bitterness of a berry a few weeks under-ripe. Have you ever made nettle tea?
I use it instead of spinach in a couple of recipes. Her gaze roamed beyond me, upriver and down. We made a ton of cordial. She was eating up the rest of the blackberries from the palm of her hand as we spoke. Her friend or boyfriend found a little worm in his last, and threw it away. Then, not without awkwardness, they climbed back over the railings. I might go to Bala too.