Chris Down

I strongly suggest you take a moment to re-read this entire thread from the perspective of a neutral third party. You are the one that escalated a totally normal technical comment into a personal conflict. Please, take a hard look at your own behaviour here before projecting that others are the bully.

That's a little different: these have for a long time been popular cage birds, so there have been escapees. But importantly those are isolated birds, not sustained breeding populations, and all of those died out.

The current self-sustaining population that is taking over the UK is generally well considered (by geographic profiling) to be from the wave of releases starting in the late 1960s.

Thanks! Apparently my knowledge is out of date. For context, the birds you mention typically have some degree of neophobia, that is, they typically avoid new prey, and the last I knew they were avoiding them. But it seems you are indeed right and they have become increasingly willing to hunt them, especially during the lockdowns. I've updated the post, appreciate the correction.

These are rose ringed parakeets (also known as ring necked parakeets), they are escapees from the latter half of the 20th century.

It used to be that they were only really ubiquitous in London, but in recent years they have more and more strongholds up north, too, like in Newcastle and Glasgow.

A few years ago there was a study using geographic profiling to map the sightings of parakeets since their appearance in the UK. There are a bunch of urban legends about how they came to be, but the study strongly suggests that people kept them as pets and just kept releasing them when they got too noisy (and since you have photographed them, you know they are indeed noisy). You can read more about the study here.

The ones here are descendants of a subspecies native to the foothills of the Himalayas, hence why they are pretty well adapted to the changing weather. They are super versatile, incredibly smart, and will eat almost anything. They also have few natural predators in the UK*, so you're only going to see more of them as time goes on.

* u/Dismal_Fox_22 corrected my out of date knowledge (thanks!) and pointed out that some raptors now are predating them increasingly after the COVID lockdowns. See this study from KCL. For context, those predators are typically neophobic (they do not eat prey they do not understand), and for a long time did not widely prey on these parakeets, but it seems they are doing so now.

Thank you so much!