When Southern Californians look up, they might see some unusually colorful neighbors: endangered Mexican parrots making a new home near the bustle of Los Angeles.
Though red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots are not indigenous to California, they've adapted to the environment over the past several decades - a hopeful development for the scientists who study the tropical birds.
In the 1950s and 60s, developers in the California suburbs spurned native trees like oaks and sycamores, in favor of sweet gums, camphor, carrotwood, fig, and ficus trees. These non-native trees eventually became home for escaped parrots that were popularly kept as pets in the 1970s and 80s, the Los Angeles Times recently reported.
"It's just cultural memory: They spend all day feeding on the seeds, berries, and flowers of the surrounding tropical treescape," John McCormack, director and curator of Occidental College's Moore Lab of Zoology, told the Times when visiting the fig trees of southern California's Temple City, near downtown Los Angeles.
"At sundown, they come together here to rest and sleep."
The red-crowned parrots, which initially hail from northeast Mexico, now number 3,000 in southern California. Their lilac-crowned counterparts have a California population of about 800, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In some respects, these developments are positive because both species are endangered. But experts do have some concerns about the birds' lives outside their natural habitat.
If the two groups of birds interbreed, for example, it could become impossible to reintroduce them to their native Mexican habitat. There have also been some instances of the birds being captured or killed by humans in the area.
Despite this, scientists at the Moore Lab see the birds' ability to thrive outside their traditional environment as a promising example of resilience.
"Despite significant niche shifts, introduced parrots are thriving, suggesting a broad fundamental niche and an ability to exploit urban resources," the lab's researchers wrote in an article for the conservation journal Diversity and Distributions. "Cities can potentially serve as refugia for threatened parrot species."
