The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

I came to this post in a rather round-about way.   Tooling around the internet the other day I came across a video someone had made of the Death Star over San Francisco.  The video ends with shot of a couple of parrots in a tree near Coit Tower.  For some odd reason, this rang a bell with me.

Coit Tower is on Telegraph Hill, so I did a quick Google search for the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.  As it happened, I hit on the exact title of a book, and a documentary filmed in the area in 2005.  As I found out more about the documentary, it became less remarkable that I'd pulled the title from thin air.  I'd seen it, long before I ever expected to visit -- much less live in -- San Francisco. 

In the documentary, a man named Mark Bittner became enamored of the flock of wild birds on Telegraph Hill and took to spending time with them, naming and feeding them.  He spent 6 years with the birds, until life intervened.  You can find out more about Mark and the parrots online and at your local bookstore.  But I wanted to see the parrots for myself, and as luck would have it, the trip would be a double win, as I had also wanted to climb the Filbert Steps, which are not only in the heart of Telegraph Hill, but which also lead directly to Coit Tower.

First let me say that the Filbert Step are daunting.  Filbert Street transitions from a normal, everyday hilly San Francisco roadway to one of the steepest navigable streets in the Western Hemisphere (31.5% grade) consisting of roughly 400 steps (Yelpers disagree on an exact number, but a happy medium of 384 has been reported by a runner who claims to keep focused on the "burn" by counting them.  If she can run those steps, I'm taking her word for the number).

Before you ever see a parrot, you hear them.  On my trek up to Coit Tower and back down, I found that where you are most likely to see them as well as hear them is somewhere around the middle of the steps.  And it was there that I stopped and tried to capture a few snapshots.  It's amazing how those buggars can disappear in a tree of leaves roughly the same color as their plumes.  When they take flight, there are roughly 200 of the birds in the air, but when they enter the garden trees along the residential street, they all but disappear.  Some runners (Yelpers who failed to diligently count the steps) say that they've yet to see one.

Top left side * Click to enlarge

Such was not my problem.  I probably could have reached out and touched one -- or fed him if that was still allowed (it's not) -- but for hours of playing Where's Waldo with my snaps, I'm still not sure I ever caught that particular bird on film.  (Or on dig'.  Whatever the kids are calling it these days.) I did however, catch a snap of a few parrots sitting on the telephone wire, with the sun behind them.

 As I stood at the midway point of the steps, hoping for a better shot to come my way before I headed back down, a couple of gentlemen rose the steps, discussing the very thing which held our interest. The Wild Parrots of... well, hear for yourself. (60 seconds)

It seems that the parrots are laughing and taunting the fellows.  "Not the spot?  Of course we're here!  RIGHT here!"  As the fellows move on, you can hear their feet on the wooden steps.

So Star Wars wasn't the right movie to trigger this venture; but if the Death Star isn't hovering over San Francisco, The Birds definitely are. Cue Hitchcock theme.