Birds

As I was walking in the Botanical garden in Paris yesterday, I noticed green parrots on the trees.

I texted my brother right away - "What a phenomenal time we live in! Sebastian, now green parrots live for free in Paris, France..."

Over the bridge, that I got to after crossing the botanical garden, overlooking the Seine River, I saw people feeding the gulls. Homeless people obviously, received old left-out meat from a butcher, and they were putting it on the rail of the bridge. The smell of the meat attracted scores of seagulls, exactly the way you saw them in Hitchcock’s' movie.

They were excited. All these gulls made it through the winter, thanks to the beggars, and the beggars through charity...What a strange circle was forming now.

And I remembered me and Helen saving a Starling that could not fly anymore. We had found it on the sidewalk two weeks ago, taken the subway through the huge suburban areas of Paris, all the way down to Maison Alfort to a bird shelter. I emailed the bird shelter to weeks ago to find out that they had just released the starling..

More outcasts, me and Helen this time, reaching out for birds…

The parrots are of a light green color and make high pitched sounds; you can see them in almost every large garden in and around the city. You can see scores of crows too, waiting to be fed on the lawns—they are very large and dark, they often chase the gulls as it is a very aggressive species, but gulls are faster than crows.

I have often seen one lone crow successfully fighting with a large number of seagulls...

You don't see that many birds when you leave the city for the countryside. Out there, in open nature, birds are cautious with human beings, maybe because they have been hunted for centuries by them, or maybe because these are two distinct populations, the rural and the urban, both sensing vastly different behaviors?

Anyway, everything is different than it used to be, I wonder what my late father would have thought, if I could have reached out to him in his grave and let him know that parrots live in Paris, France, now, thirty years after he died? He would not have believed me I guess.