THE MERLIN BIRD ID APP
Hearing a warble you don’t recognize? Allow this pocket-size ornithologist to sort it out
One of the things that most surprises visitors to London is the preponderance in recent years of large, aggressive, bright-green parakeets—often dozens of them flocking together. You can go weeks without seeing an old-fashioned sparrow or a blackbird, but you see and hear these invasive Himalayan—or possibly African—imports every day, even in the winter.
How parakeets came to be thriving in London is not known for sure. The best guess has always been that in the late 1960s, when they were first found breeding, south of London in Kent, they had escaped from aviaries.
