These parrots came to Los Angeles as pets – then went wild. Now scientists are unlocking their mysteries

Once escapees from the pet trade, Los Angeles’s feral parrots have become a vibrant part of city life, and could even aid conservation in their native homelands

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morning mist hung over the palm trees as birds chattered and cars roared by on the streets of Pasadena. It was a scene that evoked a tropical island rather than a bustling city in north-east Los Angeles county.

“It feels parrot-y,” says Diego Blanco, a research assistant at Occidental College’s Moore zoology lab, nodding to the verdant flora that surrounds us: tall trees and ornamental bushes with berries.

Blanco and John McCormack, who directs the lab, have taken me to a street corner to look for some of the loudest – yet sometimes evasive – residents of Los Angeles: free-flying parrots. Most are a vivid green species with a shock of red at their head known as red-crowned parrots, but the LA basin also hosts a number of other parrots species – including the lilac-crowned, yellow-crowned and the Nanday parakeet.