THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601240043
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
UP ON A telephone pole, beneath a transformer box, out in the cold, are four strange birds that have made a nest with limbs chewed from a gum tree in Athena Sahene's back yard.
And here, behind a desk, next to a phone, sits an idiot.
``They look like parrots,'' Athena said when I phoned her at the home on Bedford Avenue in Norfolk.
Athena said that about a year ago, she and her children noticed a parrot-like bird flying around their house.
``About a month ago, another parrot showed up,'' she said. ``Now there are four of them building the nest.''
She said it was very strange. I told her I'd drive out for a look.
``Well, they usually arrive at the nest each afternoon at about 3:30,'' she said.
I arrived on a rainy afternoon last week as Athena and her three children were waiting in the living room.. The kids were clean-cut and chatty. That would be Kaitlin and Katharine, both 7, and Tyler, 4.
We stood on the porch and looked up at the pole directly in front of their house. She said the birds were in the nest, a ragged jumble of branches that seemed to be about as large as a truck tire.
Athena brought me a pair of her husband's binoculars from a handsome old leather case. Using them, I took a look.
Sure enough, there were four birds up there, the top of their heads almost hidden by the cylindrical, gray, open-bottomed, metal transformer box.
The birds seemed pretty quiet for parrots. Maybe it was the rain. They reminded me of four buddies playing poker. Every now and then one would cock its head to the side as though wise-cracking about the bad cards in its hand.
Green with parroty-looking heads, they appeared to be about the size of pigeons. But I didn't know what they were.
``We'd really like to know more about the birds,'' Athena said. ``The neighbors, too.'' She said that in fair weather, her neighbors show up from time to time and stare up at the birds, wondering what they are up to.
Athena believes the birds may have built their nest beneath the transformer box because it not only provides a shelter but possibly gives off heat.
``Since they have built a nest, they may be preparing to mate and produce young,'' she said. ``I just don't know.
Athena said the birds keep the nest repaired, sometimes carrying gum balls from the tree to the nest.
The birds beneath that transformer had a cheeky look to them, reminding me of a tropical bird that once pecked a stemmed maraschino cherry from my fruit drink when I was vacationing south of Florida. The little bandit hopped on the outdoor table and flew away with the cherry in a blink.
When I got back to the newspaper, I went to the newspaper library for help. Only then did I realize what a fool I had been. I had failed to read columns by my colleagues at the paper.
I believe I've found the answer to Athena's questions.
The parrots are monk parakeets, so-called because of the monkish caps on their crowns.
And they are not as rarely seen here as we'd imagined. In 1993, Mary Reid Barrow reported in her Coastal Journal column in the Virginia Beach Beacon that the birds were being seen at the North End of Beach.
The monks have blue on their wing edges and buff on their breasts and heads. Mary Reid said the birds had also been eating scuppernong grapes down on Blackwater Road. (The birds cause significant damage to fruit crops in some places.) Others have been seen in the Sherry Park neighborhood of Virginia Beach near the Norfolk line, she reported.
Guy Friddell - an even rarer bird - has also written about monk parakeets. In 1994, he described a nest of the birds located - as many of the local nests are - beneath a transformer box on a pole on Granby Street. The one Guy wrote about was on the south side of the bridge over the Lafayette River in Norfolk.
(Virginia Power took that nest down after one of the poking sticks placed in the nest caused a power shortage at a nearby diagnostic clinic. But power company employees later replaced the nest sticks. The nest is still there, only a few blocks from the one on Bedford Avenue.)
I tell you that unless you study those Guy and Mary Reid columns with the intensity of a scholarly monk with a magnifying glass studying the footnotes on an annotated version of the holy scriptures, you are going to be hopelessly uninformed. I've learned my lesson.
``The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds'' says the monk parakeet is native to South America but has spread southward from New York after a shipment of them escaped from confinement at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the late 1960s.
Larger than a pet-store parakeet but smaller than the large, Amazon variety usually sought as pets, the monks are rowdy critters. They make a loud, harsh screeching ``eech-eech'' sound.
Many of the monk parakeet nests are very large and may contain as many as six pairs of birds, each bird joining in the communal nest-building. The nests are used for both shelter and egg hatching.
Sometimes the monk parakeets set up shop in holes in trees. And at last report, some had nested in the globe of a spotlight with a broken glass cover that illuminates the Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle in New York's Central Park.
Virginia Power will probably be keeping an eye on those birds on the pole in front of Athena's house. Meantime, I'll be keeping two of them on my friends' columns. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
What is most likely a monk parakeet adds a twig to a nest under a
transformer box on Bedford Avenue in Norfolk.
by CNB