The exotic, and possibly invasive, birds of Brussels.

MARCH 21, 2023

The birds that reside around the Ixelles Ponds, in a salubrious part of Brussels, tend to be unremarkable pigeons, ducks and gulls. Their pale plumage, along with their dreary demeanor, is perfect camouflage for the European capital’s melancholia of wind, rain and bureaucracy.

But a flamboyant foreigner is changing all that. The ring-necked parakeet, a charismatic émigré with a splendid green coat and a vociferous sense of self, has quadrupled in numbers since the early 2000s.

Most mornings on my daily dog walk, as my two Labradors scour the streets for scattered frites, nature’s noisy contest plays out along the wide avenues. We pass stately Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Gothic buildings that draw architectural tour groups. But the pandemonium of parakeets, screeching loudly from the trees, always proves the most engaging part of my daily safari. Many a passerby stops to take a photo of the parakeets that amass every morning and night outside one of the local schools. A statue of King Leopold II — regularly defaced with graffiti and red paint — watches from the adjacent Jardin du Roi.

Brussels’ parakeets have proven controversial. Some say the parakeets are too loud, too messy, and too destructive. They have been known to carve holes in the facades of stone buildings and to chew through telephone cables and internet wires. Yet experts across Europe disagree over whether to treat the birds as a problem or to simply let them live.

Today the city is home to some 8,000 parakeets, many of whom descend from a flock of exotic birds that a local circus released in the early 1980s. Robert Florizoone, the circus owner’s son, told Belgian media in August last year that doing so was “a small miscalculation.”

The birds now appear to be everywhere. Approximately 1,000 parakeets, mostly of the ring-necked variety, gather in trees around the Ixelles Ponds, squawking loudly for hours until they disperse.

Even the NATO headquarters once faced an invasion of parakeets. From 2015 to 2018, to discourage further incursions, NATO deployed falconers and put up loudspeakers that played the cries of birds of prey. “NATO moved to a new headquarters, where there is no parakeet presence, in 2018,” a NATO official said in an email.

Urban myths about their origins abound, including tales of birds escaping during the filming of “The African Queen” in 1951 and Jimi Hendrix releasing parakeets in London during the swinging 1960s.

In 2019, the ParrotNet project, run by the University of Kent, brought together 80 researchers and policymakers from 16 countries to study European parakeet populations. The group found wild parakeets in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. Parakeets, the group noted, cause significant damage to crops and local environments, which might warrant them to be “designated as invasive species of local and regional concern.” Around Barcelona, monk parakeets have caused a 30 percent reduction in corn, plum and pear harvests, the group said.

Europe’s total parakeet population is estimated to be 85,000. Urban myths about their origins abound, including tales of birds escaping during the filming of “The African Queen” in 1951 and Jimi Hendrix releasing parakeets in London during the swinging 1960s. The Great Storm of 1987, which saw a cyclone damage the British Isles and France, has also been blamed, as has a robbery of George Michael’s London home in the 1990s. (Researchers now say the most likely cause of the population boom is the release of parakeets that had been kept as pets.)

Luís Reino, a researcher at the University of Porto who worked on the ParrotNet project, said the scale of parakeet damage varies by location. In Spain and Italy, for example, parakeets are accused of killing small bats and destroying fruits in gardens and orchards. In 2018, Athens city officials destroyed their huge nests to protect local woodpeckers and bats; they worried that the nests has become so heavy that they risked falling upon passing pedestrians. In Israel, parakeets have been destroying cash crops like olives and almonds. Spanish authorities reportedly took direct action in 2019, using air-rifles to individually shoot parakeets.

Many fear that parakeets, hailing from the tropics of South America, Africa and Asia, are forcing the local birds of Brussels from their homes. Reino said a species is considered “invasive” when it threatens native organisms and the functioning of their ecosystems. While he said he is not personally comfortable with culling animals, he nevertheless accepts that “action is needed” if an alien or invasive species has a negative impact.

“It’s about losers and winners,” Reino said. “Sometimes non-natives are the winners. But it is critical that we also take harsh and difficult actions against invasive species. They [can] potentially cause quite a lot of damage.”

Alain Paquet, an ornithologist at Brussels-based environmental group Natagora, said the organization’s extensive research into the issue found that the parakeets have had no impact on native biodiversity in the city. “It seems to us that the money and energy needed to manage the parakeets would be better invested in other nature conservation issues,” he said. Those causes might include protecting endangered snakes or helping amphibians procreate.

An EU spokesman for the environment told The Dial that a monk parakeet risk assessment is “ongoing.” After a similar assessment, the ring-necked parakeet was not put on its list of “invasive alien species” because member states could not agree on whether it justified such a listing. The decision to add a species to the list is not taken lightly — inclusion would require member states hosting parakeets to “eradicate or control” them along with numerous obligations to prevent their populations from growing, the spokesman said.

An official estimate found that invasive species cost the EU 12 billion euros every year.

On a recent morning, I walked with Adrien Chevalier, an ornithologist and biodiversity officer for the Royal Belgian League for the Protection of Birds (BRLPB), on a loop around the ponds. Established in 1922 by the Marquise Antonia de Pierre, the BRLPB advocates for the protection of wild animals and the environment.

This slither of greenery around the ponds is popular among joggers, summer drinkers, pot smokers and parents pedaling their children along in front-loading cargo bikes. Fishing is allowed, but only on Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays, and all caught fish must be returned to the water.

“The parakeets are so visible and loud, easy to spot, it’s easy to think they are an issue,” Chevalier said. “They are an easy target.”

Yet, in his eyes, the birds are just trying to be good neighbors. “Parakeet calls are so loud, firstly, because they are large birds, but also because they are colony birds,” he said. “They need to communicate, sometimes over long distances. This lets other parakeets know where the group is, to recruit more birds for the night.”

In Brussels, the noisy birds have thus far been answered only with silence. Earlier this year, to celebrate biodiversity, the municipality of Ixelles, together with the BRLPB, installed signs promoting 12 bird species that live at the ponds, including cormorants, herons and swans. Even the Egyptian goose, itself on the EU’s invasive alien species list, got a mention. The most conspicuous bird, the parakeet, was absent.