San Francisco firefighters and an animal control officer freed a wild parrot on Sunday after it got its head caught between two panes of glass on a third-floor balcony on Telegraph Hill. The bird was unhurt and flew off.
How the crews got the bird out
San Francisco Animal Care & Control said Officer Mullen responded alongside the San Francisco Fire Department after the parrot was spotted stuck on the balcony of a building under construction. Firefighters climbed to the roof and lowered a ladder down to the balcony.
From there they slid the bird upward until its head came free. “They wrapped the bird in a towel and handed it off to Officer Mullen, who checked out the bird,” the agency wrote in a post reported by UPI on September 1.
The check was quick and the news was good. “Thankfully they were fine: their wings, legs and neck were all OK, so Officer Mullen released the bird,” the post said. The parrot moved to a nearby tree and settled on a branch.
It had been trapped a long time. SFist reported that the bird had apparently been stuck for hours, and the agency’s own account is blunter still: “The parrot was very tired from struggling all day but looked healthy. Other parrots came around and were squawking joyfully in celebration.”
The parrots on those roofs used to be pets
The bird belongs to San Francisco’s feral parrot flock, which is made up mostly of red-masked parakeets. That is the same bird the pet trade sells as the cherry-headed conure, and its wild range is nowhere near California, which explains a lot about the species. Red-masked parakeets come from southwestern Ecuador and northwestern Peru.
An adult runs about 33 cm (13 in) long, half of that tail, bright green with a red mask and a pale ring around the eye. Red feathers on the underside of the wing show when a bird lifts it, which is the mark most photographs of the flock end up catching.
The colony started with cage birds that escaped or were let go, and it has been in the city long enough to be filmed. The 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill followed it, alongside Mark Bittner’s book of the same name.
Feeding them has been illegal since 2007
In June 2007 the Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to ban feeding parrots in public spaces, a measure introduced by board president Aaron Peskin. Anyone caught handing them food can face a misdemeanor charge and a fine of up to $100, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time.
The case for the ban was about the birds rather than the neighbors. Supporters argued that steady handouts erode a flock’s ability to find its own food, and that parrots tamed by hand-feeding become easy for someone to catch and keep.
The hazard was a gap, not a predator
What caught this parrot was not a cat, a hawk or a fall. It was a gap the exact width of a parrot’s head, on a building site where nobody had closed it off: wide enough to push into, too narrow to reverse out of.
That geometry is worth looking for at home. Balcony rails, half-finished work, the slot between a window and its screen and the space behind a cage all offer it, and a bird that has pushed its head through cannot reason its way back. The moment that puts a companion parrot outside in the first place is usually far more ordinary than a construction site: the first warm day, when the balcony door goes open.
In some cities, a loose parrot is not a lost parrot
This is the part San Francisco makes confusing, and it is worth knowing before you act. A green parrot with a red face sitting on a street lamp in that city is almost certainly a flock bird going about its day, and it needs nothing from you.
A cockatiel, a budgie, an African grey or a macaw is a different case entirely, because none of those live wild there. That bird belongs to somebody. If it is trapped, grounded or letting a stranger walk right up to it, call animal control rather than chase it; and if the missing bird is yours, the first forty-eight hours run in a specific order.
The flock’s reaction on Sunday is a reminder of what these birds actually are. The parrots that gathered and called while the officer worked were doing what a flock does, and that social machinery is the thing owners most often misjudge in a living room. First responders in the Bay Area field this kind of call more often than the odd-news headlines suggest, from stuck parrots to a pelican in Alameda that nobody on the dock could reach.
The species is doing better here than at home
There is an uncomfortable footnote to a story about parrots thriving on American street lamps. The red-masked parakeet is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List, most recently assessed in 2021, in a native range that covers a narrow strip of two countries.
Sunday’s bird went back to its flock in a tree a few yards from the pane that held it. That is the ordinary ending, and getting there took a crew on a roof, a ladder lowered over the edge and a towel.
Featured photograph: two feral red-masked parakeets on a street lamp in San Francisco, by Ingrid Taylar, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. It is a library photograph of the San Francisco flock and not the bird rescued on Telegraph Hill.