Walking through the park the other day, I had the uneasy feeling I was being watched. Looking up, I noticed a flock of about 20 green parakeets (rose-ringed parakeets) huddled on the power lines above me. Since the native birds here don’t usually congregate in large numbers on power lines, it felt unusual, but strangely … familiar. Yes! It felt like I was in the Hitchcock movie The Birds, but this version was decidedly upscale. Instead of the drab, proletarian crows featured in the movie, my version starred these exotic, lime-green-colored parakeets with their long, regal tail feathers. Their distinctive warbling also transported me to a far-away tropical forest. The Hitchcockian (Bernard Herrmannian) screeching strings were ringing in my ears as I imagined my downfall, pecked to death by exotic birds in paradise.
Btw, when a pet (including parakeets, which are not native to Japan) is released into the wild by its owner, or, for instance, if a house cat leaves its home and becomes feral, there is a good chance they will have a negative impact on the local ecology. So let’s all be good boys and girls and take responsibility for our pets. Abandoning a pet is a crime in both the United States and Japan. In New York State, pet shops are prohibited from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits.