 I first met Mark Bittner when I was working in the North Beach Branch Library years ago. And he came in one day and he asked if we had any books about parrots. And we, I think we had one or two. And he read them. They, he soon asked if we had any more. He was taking, turned out he was taking care of a flock of wild parrots and some of them were sick. And so we sent away to other branch libraries in the system, reserved some books and they came here. He read those. But soon he needed bigger, more important books, more intricate books. And so we did some research on some databases and introduced him to the interlibrary loan system where we got books from other libraries throughout the United States and some of them were helpful. And then after that we did a program at the North Beach Library. Anyway, fast forward years later, Mark is now sort of a world renowned. He's appeared on CNN Time Magazine. He's an author of a book. So it's my great delight to introduce Mark Bittner, the author of the parrots of Telegraph Hill, a love story. Thank you. Thank you, Gardner. It's actually a love story with wings. So it's nice to be here on Valentine's Day. I've been coming here since 1997, telling people that I was working on a book. And it's really nice to finally be here with that book. I first started this book, actually, I think in May or April of 1996. And Gardner was my very first reader. I had a little first chapter done and I wanted him to look at it. At the time it was called Tales from an Urban Jungle and it starts out with this description of, you start from Market in Sandsome and you come up and you see all the different kinds of neighborhoods and people that walk along those streets and then you get up to the Greenwich steps where I live. And it's a completely different world and I go into a great long description of the garden. Then there's a little dissertation about bicycling that I like. I like bicycling. So I showed this to Gardner and he very gently told me, he says, well, I'm imagining myself as somebody buying this book and I think it's a book about parrots. And so far all I've been seeing is a description of cities and bicycles. So it was very helpful for me to get that straight. So here's the finished version. Now we start, this is how the book starts. I'm standing on the front deck of an old cottage on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. The cottage, vine covered in frail, is nestled within the immense and chaotically lush gardens that tumble down the hills steep eastern face. Just to my right is a large cage containing three lime green parrots with cherry red heads. On top of the cage another parrot prowls at liberty. In my left hand I'm holding a cup filled with sunflower seeds. Clinging to the cup's rim are two more parrots who are making quick and expert work of the seeds. There are parrots on my right hand, on my shoulders and on my head. In front of me on the limbs of a tall shrub are another dozen or so. They watch me with eager eyes as I pass around a handful of seeds. One of them determined to get my attention flaps his wings furiously causing the thin branch he's perched on to bounce up and down. Five more parrots eat from a small pile of seeds on the deck railing. To my far right a gang of 15 crowds around a large seed filled dish that sits on the thick growth of ivy climbing over the railing corner. Another 10 sit on the power lines above me and all I'm surrounded by more than 50 parrots. The parrots on the lines start up an insistent staccato squawking that grows louder and more anxious as those below gradually join in. A group of tourists their faces lit with fascination stop to stare. The squawking is getting so loud that one of the tourists has to shout his question. Don't you ever lose any? They're not mine I shout back laughing, they're wild. Wild? Are you serious? Wild parrots in San Francisco? Before I can answer the screaming hits a tremendous peak and the entire flock bolts. In the scramble to leave a few of the birds nearly collide with the startled ducking tourists. The parrots continue to scream as they fly on stiff frantic wings through a gap in a row of trees and disappear from view. Yes, wild parrots in San Francisco. So I'm gonna do a little bit of a slideshow. And then we're gonna have a little special treat for you. There a lot of people have been wanting to see the film and we're gonna show a little piece of it. The documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Okay, now if anybody has seen my slideshow before it's usually centered around just the parrots but because this deals with my book we're gonna sort of follow the course of the book a little bit. Um, these are my friends, they're wild parrots. Alcatraz in the background to identify them as San Francisco parrots. Now there's two strains in this book. 85% of the book probably deals with my experience with the birds. But there's also my life, the path that led me to these birds. And that starts up in Vancouver, Washington where I was, and I grew up in, I went to high school in the 60s and I was hearing about all the exciting things that were happening in San Francisco and I was really bored with my life where I lived. It's a small town right across the river from Portland, Oregon. And this is Vesuvio, there in North Beach and you can see right on that sign it says we are itching to get away from Portland, Oregon. And that's what I really felt. I wanted to get down to San Francisco where it was happening. But my interest wasn't, my interest was in what I thought was the intellectual revolutionary consciousness movement down here. And that's what really interested me. I was interested in, I guess you could call consciousness expansion. A lot of people think drugs when they hear that term but to me it was just having a great awareness that there's more to the mind than we usually see. But I mean you see the Jack Kerouac alley, there are all those kind of names who vote something for me that I really wanted to come see. And everything that interested me about San Francisco it all seemed to pass through city lights in some way or another. So I was one of those people that really loved all of that and I was just eager to come down here and live with it. I saw I was gonna be a musician which really wasn't, I knew as soon as I made the decision inside of me that it wasn't the right thing for me but I went ahead and did it anyway. I came down here I was gonna be a musician and I saw myself walking up and down Grand Avenue talking to other poets and writers and musicians and didn't really work out that way because I was trying to be something that I wasn't. And my whole life fell apart. It's not something I can go into here, it's done in the book, but I was on that street but I was actually living on it. I was homeless and scrounging for coins along the gutters there. It was the most difficult thing I've ever been through in my life. At first I would go up to the top of the hill and sleep in the bushes up there. I was following an idea. It wasn't like I had a problem with alcohol or drugs or anything, I didn't. But I was following an idea and that idea took me into this realm where you follow your heart. You don't do anything based on career or money or anything like that. And it terrified me to follow that path but I didn't see a way to leave it. I had to do it, I felt that it was the only way for me to go. Well, I got tired of climbing that hill and I started sleeping in alleys which was something I was really low to do. I didn't want to be seen. I grew up in a middle class neighborhood and the idea of sleeping in an alley was just as revolving as it could be to me but it was too exhausting to be going up that hill every day. Well, one day two policemen stopped. I was in that area right in front of this building where those white posts are and I was asleep in my sleeping bag and they were wrapping on my feet saying, you're not gonna be sleeping here anymore. So somebody told me about the hotel there on the right and I said that bunch of people were sleeping up on the roof of it and that I could go there. And I did. And the Tower Hotel there was sort of my entry into North Beach. Before that, I didn't really know anybody. I was just this lonesome street guy, I guess you could say. I mean, it wasn't, I was studying. I was really trying to understand what was inside of me so it wasn't like I was just hanging out. But it was a very hard time. I didn't have a way of supporting myself and I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I got into the hotel and I started finding odd jobs and I started getting centered a little bit. Grounded, I guess you'd say. Well, I got real tired of concrete and asphalt and all of that kind of thing. North Beach is a very attractive looking place but it's also very hard. And after 14 years of just really being one step away from the street, I got an opportunity to drive for an elderly woman and clean her house. And she gave me a place to stay and that little cottage there on the left. This is the Greenwich Steps and it's a big garden area as you can see. If you know it, it's right parallel to the Filbert Steps, which most people know. And it has a lot of trees and bushes and flowers, all kinds of things there. It's very beautiful and quaint. Well, about two years after I moved in I started seeing the strangest thing. I didn't know anything about parrots, anything about birds. But I was seeing these parrots. I mean, it was just baffling. I didn't know what to make of it. But I loved watching them. They were beautiful. That was what, this is every February, this saucer magnolia blossoms and they eat blossoms. And it's a really beautiful sight to see that tree filled with these green and red parrots. I didn't know anything about parrots as I say. And one of the first things I did was try to find out what species they were. And I found out that they're what the pet trade calls cherry-headed conures and what scientists or an apologist called red masked parakeets. When they were in the trees, it was difficult to see what they were doing, but when they came out on the lines they were a lot more visible. And I really got a kick out of them. They scream when they fly. So I always knew when they were coming. And whenever I heard them I would run outside and stop whatever I was doing to get a glimpse of them. They loved to play fight. And there are real acrobats about it. And they love to hang upside down. And sometimes they hang upside down together. Well, it was just entertainment for me at first. I just loved watching them. I didn't think anything was going to start up watching that. They were inaccessible. Like any other bird, they were just on these lines above me. I just look at them. Well, okay, the cottage, the flesh colored building on the lower right, that's where I was living in the lower part. Well, the elderly woman was living in this big brown building behind it. And there's two fire escapes, as you can see. And I moved, she got old and she was having problems with memory and she was put in a home and they needed somebody to care take that those top two floors. She owned the whole property, but those top two floors were her unit. And they wanted me to just live in it until they figured out what to do with the property, some relatives. So I went up there and it was about a time that I was trying to get interested in getting out of the city, getting into nature. And then I ran across something by Gary Snyder that sort of stymied that whole plan. He was saying, if you want to get into nature, start where you are. He says, you can find nature even in a city. And he mentioned even in a big city like San Francisco. So I tried to take that idea seriously. And I started, okay, I decided I'll try to get into the native birds. That garden has a lot of birds in it and I didn't know anything about birds and I decided to take the time to learn about them. I put a bowl of seeds out on the fire escape and one day something happened that I never imagined. I'd never seen the parrots anywhere near a house and they all came and I was just delighted. There's a door to the left that you can't see and I used to sit behind that door. Look at them through this pane of glass. And I sat there for six months every day, three or four times a day. And it was always this thing where it's okay, I'm gonna do this one more time and then I'm gonna stop and get serious about my life. But every time I'd hear them, I'd run back and I'd watch them. So I started having trouble after six months with the guy who lived below me. There were all these seeds raining down on his fire escape and when he had the windows open, they'd come into his house and we had a big fight about it. And he said, one day, okay, you have to chase them away. This cannot happen right now. Well, I loved these birds. I'd really grown to love them and I didn't wanna terrify them. But I was in a situation where I was forced to scare them away. So I decided, okay, I would step outside something I'd never done, scare them away, but I'd go very, very gently so that if I did terrify them, if I did scare them out, I wouldn't at least be terrorizing them. But when I stepped out, they didn't move. They just sat there looking at me. They would gotten very used to me sitting there and they'd come to trust me. Well, after that, I stopped sitting in the kitchen. I started coming out with them and they got very used to me. They started taking seeds from my hand and the bird on my head, that's Chomsky. He used to perch up there and try to figure out what he was gonna do next. And we got very comfortable with one another. That's a baby there. He's got the almost entirely green head. And the babies were less afraid of me than the adults. And because I wasn't eating the babies, the adults gained more confidence in me. And before long, they'd all left the bowl practically. Practically all of them had left the bowl. They'd come over and they were eating from my hands. And for some reason, they preferred to eat from my hand and from the bowl. And I just loved it. I mean, the first year of doing it was just constant joy. They had a thing that I quickly discovered that each bird had to be in the same spot on the railing each time. They each had their own spot. But that gave me the opportunity to learn the identities and name them. This is Patrick. Patrick has one of the most extensive red heads of all the cherry heads. He's also a confirmed bachelor, which is unusual. Most of them are paired up. But he's taken one mate. He'd taken a mate recently, but I haven't seen him. He may be dead now. But for the longest time, he was a single parrot. This is Gibson. Gibson is one of the stories in the book, a very impressive story. If you look on his beak, you'll see this sort of groove running parallel to the outer outline of his beak. And that's how one way I was recognized him. He also had a sort of orangish feathers on top of his head. And a friend of mine used to have this Gibson guitar that had this cherry sunburst finish. It reminded me of that, so that's why he's called Gibson. This is Noah. Noah was the first bird to take a seed from my hand. And each bird had its own particular way of eating. Some birds would take a mouthful of a beak full of seeds and then push each seed forward one by one as they needed them. But Noah's thing was to take a fistful of seed, shall we say, a clawful and eat them one at a time. This is Sonny. Sonny is one of the main characters in the book. Sonny was named for Sonny Corleone because he was a real mafioso type parrot. A real tough guy, troublemaker. And he sort of looks like that there too. He looked like that all the time, but the only photograph I have were for some reason that shows that that squinty eyed look. This is Scrapparella. She's notorious for being a feather plucker. She pulled out all those feathers. People always ask how can they stand the cold and the usual response, the usual answer is, well, they have these down feathers and the down feathers will grow more thick if they need to. But she pulls out her down feathers and I'd seen her in 40 degree weather and it didn't faze her. So they're just tough. How do they stand the cold? They're tough. This is Eric. I used to think of Eric as the leader of the flock, but I've come to understand that there is no leader in the flock. You'll see the band on his leg. That's a very important thing. The people wonder how the flock got started. What happened is that I don't know exactly how the flock got started. I have a lot of speculation that's in the book. But one thing I can be certain of is that the flock was started by birds that were caught in the wild in South America and shipped up here to be sold as pets, which was legal up until 1993. That's a quarantine band. It's a specific type of band. And I've seen about six or seven banded birds in the flock. And Eric is one of them. This is Mingus. Mingus isn't really a big part of the book, but he's a big part of the film. And if you ever get to see the film, he's gonna make a big impression on you. One of the most notable things about him is that he was even meaner than the son. He was a wild-caught bird too. And this is Connor. Connor was my very first favorite bird in the flock. He's, as you can see, a different species. He's a blue-crowned conure. Another wild-caught. A very beautiful regal bird, a very intelligent bird. He was always surrounded by the cherry heads and they didn't treat him well. They didn't like him because he was a different species. And they sort of turned him into an outcast and more or less hung out with the other outcasts in the flock. Occasionally an escaped budgie would show up and they would inevitably go to Connor because Connor was tolerant of them. Well, as I got to know them, I just, I came to love certain aspects of them. One is their exuberance, just their craziness. I mean, I can't imagine a wild bird, a native bird, shall we say, coming in for a landing like that. He looks like he's done an amusement park, right, to me. But they just have this goofiness in their personality that anybody owns a parrot is seen over and over again. A lot of what they do is playful, a lot of play-fighting, but they also get into a lot of violent fights and it's a great interest to the rest of the flock. You can see this bird here is jumping across the bowl to attack the bird that is back to the camera. And the other two birds in the back are very interested in what's going on. And one's hanging from the line and watching. But they're also very loving with one another. I mean, the pairs generally stay together lifelong. You know, occasionally there is a divorce and there is some woman stealing that goes on. But they're very affectionate with one another. And this is a nest. It's interesting, they're non-native species and they prefer non-native trees for nesting. This is the Canary Island Date Palm and this is where you'll see them most often. They use holes, they don't build stick nests. They'll increase the size of a hole but they won't start with one from scratch. And this is a baby, this is Paco. They are all green when they come out of the nest and they're about the same size as the adults. You don't have anything to compare it to there, but they're about seven eighths the size of an adult. This is another shot of Paco that I really like which shows their puppy-headedness. He was in my house for a while and that's in the book. There's a lot of stuff I'm not gonna explain here because it's in the book. The parents are extremely loyal to their babies. When this bird here is Mandela, Mandela got winged by a cat and that's Sonny, his father, and Sonny came to sit on the cage as much as he could every day. He'd have to leave occasionally to go eat but he kept coming back and he stayed on that cage and made sure Mandela was okay. So I was in the house for three years more or less doing this thing with the parents that just kept going day after day. I was still going through this thing, okay, I've gotta stop doing this, but finally I had to move. I was supposed to leave the property completely, but I didn't have any place to go. So that little cottage that I was living in before, I just sort of snuck back down into it. And my idea was, well, to write a book. I was tired of not being able to support myself away, having to go from place to place like this without any sure place to go. So I decided to write a book and I stopped feeding the parents. Well, they found out where I was and they started landing in the window and staring in at me and I was sort of of a mind at first like, come on, leave me alone. I'm busy, but then the irony hit me that I'm writing a book about how much I love these birds and at the same time I'm telling them to go away. So I started feeding them again and I took it out to the front deck of this cottage. Well, that brought me out into public view and eventually the property was sold, but the new owners loved what I was doing. So they let me continue doing it. For a few more years, then the cottage actually reached a real bad place and I had to go and that wasn't a problem for me. I was ready to move on, but there was a lot of, some of you may have heard the news. I mean, at the time there were a bunch of news stories. My landlords at the time were sort of treated like villains, but they weren't at all. They've been very kind to me. So I'm gonna tell you one story and it's a story that's not in the book. This is Olive and Pushkin. Olive is a different species in the rest of the flock. She's the one in front. She's a mitered conure and her mate Pushkin in the back there is a cherry head. There's only one of these in the flock. This is her again. I don't know if you can see the difference. It's very clear to me, but she has less red. Her beak is shaped slightly different. The eye ring is a pure white where the cherry head sort of have a creamy white. Well, she went off to nest with Pushkin one year and they nest around the first day of summer and then they come off the nest near the end of July and she came off the nest. The eggs had hatched, but she was unstable. She was very wobbly on her feet. Well, I was thinking maybe just because she's been sitting on those eggs all these weeks but she kept getting worse every day. She kept coming to me for food and she wasn't doing well. This was really just a matter of three or four days and then one day she fell onto my deck. She was on her back. She was getting worse and worse so I picked her up and carried her inside and took care of her. Well, I knew she had babies in the nests and I assumed they were doomed because somebody needs to keep those babies warm at first. They don't have very many feathers and they can get cold too easily. But Pushkin kept coming to me all day long for seeds. Here he is. And he was clearly eating for more than just himself. And so I started thinking, well, maybe he's raising those babies on his own which was interesting. He had never been a father before. He's a unique parrot and he's a woman stealer. He's done it twice. Olive was his second and he really evidently wanted to be a father badly because he was doing this all on his own. I was amazed. I said, I wasn't sure whether he could pull this off but one day he came out with three of them and this is Fanny, one of the three. She's a hybrid and here he's feeding her. So he's a woman stealer but a great father. This is Fanny as a grown adult. She was one of the, it was interesting. She was, usually the babies are a little bit afraid of me for about two months but after a week that she was out one of the other cherry heads attacked her and she flew to my shoulder for protection. And that was amazing at the time. I was just thrilled to death. And she always was very close to me. She used to, you'll see her in the film actually. So I won't tell you what she does but she has this little game she plays with me all the time. Now there are the hybrids, the two kinds of hybrids in the flock. There's one like her where she's all green like a cherry head normally is when it comes out. And then there's another that has this maroon patch on its forehead. Now I've learned that the hybrids are fertile also and you have quite a few double hybrids now and I thought that the strain of the mitre, this patch on the forehead is a mitred feature, mitred conure feature. And I would assume that that strain would get bred out because there's only one mitred conure in the flock but actually it's just getting weirder and weirder. This is a baby, it's the best photograph I have. It's not very good but she has this wild patch going all the way back down her neck. So they're looking stranger and stranger but they're perfectly healthy fine birds. Now this is one bird that I'm not gonna tell you much about other than she's the main character in the book for me. This is Dogen. This is right after she came into my care. This is Dogen and Connor. These are just images for you to remember when you read the book and that's Dogen. And that photograph will mean something to you when you read the book. Okay, now I was telling you about being, in the book I call myself a Dharma bum which was a Gary Snyder term, a homeless seeker of truth. Well I didn't call myself when I was doing that but I was, when I was living on the street I was trying to understand ideas of consciousness. So when I got involved with the parrots I was very serious about what I was doing. At first it was just a lark but as I got deeper and deeper into it and it took over my life I had a lot of questions come up. I was serious about what I was doing and I kept coming into this, I would read a lot of science books and inevitably I would see this term anthropomorphism and I saw that a lot of what I was seeing and thinking and writing about the parrots would be considered by scientists anthropomorphism. Well I didn't like their concept I didn't really think that what they were saying was correct but I didn't have a thought out response to it. Not a response in the sense well I wanted to defend my own idea I just wanted to know well what makes sense here? So there is one chapter in this book that deals with that and it's really the chapter I'm proudest of because I thought it would be the most difficult but it actually was the easiest. And it sort of lays out my idea of what I think their personalities are how they're similar to us rather than different. And if you look in that eye you see an intelligence there. There's character in those eyes. Then you have to ask well what is intelligence? What is character? Some scientists would say that we're just a stew of chemicals being driven by our genes and that's what character is but I don't believe that and that's what the book deals with. That's really the it's not really dealt with in any of the advertising for the book but that's really for me what the book is about. So just to finish up here I left for two years and then I came back and I moved into this house right here which is this is shot is taken from the house where I first started feeding parrot that gives you an idea of how close I am and I am feeding them again not as often as I used to. And there's a tree on the right side there that I stand on this roof that you can't see and I feed them from that tree while they're perched in that tree. So this is how I think of these birds more than anything. They're just playful and they're beautiful. Thank you. Okay so what's gonna happen next where we're gonna show a little piece of the film and then I'm gonna take questions. Yeah. Sometimes they have the wrong names very often but if you watch the behavior over a period of time you start to figure it out. I mean like when it's nesting season the females disappear. The male in a cup will still be around but the female goes to sit on the eggs and that's how I usually tell. But you can get a feel for it too. Most of my intuitions were usually born out in reality. Yes in the orange jacket. Well he was just somebody that passed by and he was not that unusual to tell you the truth. He was a little bit more refined but you'd be amazed how many people would try to find some ironic aspect to all of this. Like come on let's say game here. Yes. Sort of. Yeah. I can't really say that that is the case but there is one example and it's in the book. Yes. In the slide show. That was a budgie, a budgie regar. It's what we usually call a parakeet although that's kind of a misnomer. All the birds that you saw in the slide show are parakeets. The red, the cherry heads are parakeets. It's a broad term but the little thing that we usually call a parakeet, the budgie regar, it just got the name parakeet but it is an example of a parakeet and what a parakeet is, is a small to medium-sized parrot with a long tail but they are parrots, yes. Okay, I was working on the book already and I had two calls from people that were interested in doing films and nobody came through. I was interested in having a film because I just wanted something to remember them by because I thought I'd be leaving them forever one day. And then finally the filmmaker, she heard about me, she called and it just worked out. Now the film, it is actually a film, it was not shot on video, it was shot on 16 millimeter film. She's a documentary filmmaker. We're hoping to find a distributor so that we can do a national release all of migration. And it, oh, I forget the phone name, what's the name? Wing to Migration, right, I saw that too and I don't remember the name but if it doesn't come about, it will come out on VHS and DVD anyway. But the first effort is to get it out on theatrically and it is gonna be in the San Francisco Film Festival late April so you have to watch for that because it tickets to go fast. Yes, yes, yes, they come from a hot dry area, Ecuador and Peru, the coastal area, it's not jungle though. It's like Savannah, yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, I do think. Well, I don't know if you would say emotionally. I mean, there's an example in the book where one day it was when I was getting ready to leave them the first time and I thought it was all over, I was busy getting ready to leave and I put the bowl out and I usually would have fed them but I was just busy so I just put the bowl out, came back in and I decided, oh, I should go back out and feed and as soon as I did, they all left the bowl and it came over to me. So for some reason they enjoyed eating from me but you ask, there is one, I mean, I didn't do this just for the buck. There is something I learned and I touched on it in the slide show. There was something very clear that I learned so it wasn't just something I was doing for a while in the end. Oh yeah, sorry. I first saw the birds in 1990, I first started feeding them in 93 and I left them in 99 and I came back in 2001 and I'm feeding them now. Yes. Yeah. Okay, well let me say something. Yeah. We're working on all of that on all fronts. Yes, Gardner. Oh, sorry. I don't know, there are scrub jays, I know that and I've seen, actually I saw Stellar's Jay. Blue Jay, yes, probably, yeah, I know what you're saying. Right, I've seen, there are scrub jays, that's a kind of, I guess what you'd say, Blue Jay. I'm gonna answer some more questions but I just wanna say one thing in case you don't know it, there is a woman in the back from a clean well-lighted place for books who is selling books. I will be coming back there to sign them if you want when we're done with the question and answer. Okay, yes. Yeah. Well, I don't feed them reliably right now and I'm not out in public, in a public place to do that. That may change eventually but I always tell people the best way to see them right now is to go to fairy plaza around 430 because they go into the poplars there and they just scream, like there's about 130 in the block right now, yeah. And they scream and scream and scream and it's just, and they're playing. They do something that I call psychogubble. They sound like turkeys that have gone insane and going, and they're just hanging upside down and biting each other in the face and having a grand old time, yes, yes. Yes, yeah, that's what I was talking about, that area. They don't attack people. What they do is they... Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, I think over time, over time people are going to encounter them serendipitously more and more. So many of them, yes, you. Yes. Well, actually, I make that point in the book. The thing about the native birds often is that the iris is dark, almost as dark as the people, so it's very difficult to see the pupil distinctly. And that's one of the reasons you can see the parrot's intelligence is because they have that paler iris around the pupil. So the pupil is distinct and that's where you see, I think, a personality or intelligence, yes. Yeah, there are two flocks in the city and it's a different species, canary winged parakeets. That flock actually used to fly a telegraph hill and then when this flock started, they kicked those birds out of the north end of town, yes. That's a different flock. Well, there are flocks, I'm learning more. It's not an uncommon thing, parrot flocks, although you just don't see them. You might not notice them. There's a flock, two flocks in San Francisco, a flock in San Carlos, a flock in Sunnyvale, a flock in Palo Alto, a flock in Berkeley. These are all flocks I know about. And then they're in Southern California, there's a flock in Chicago, Illinois. There's a flock in Baldwin, New York. There's a flock in New York City. There are flocks all over Florida, all over Southern Texas, Southern California. New Orleans. There's a flock in Seattle. There's a flock in Portland. There's a flock in Utah. No, no. Well, no, it's interesting. The thing that I have seen is that the parrots will have a lot of territorial squabbles but only with other parrots. They ignore native birds. I have one slide, I didn't include it, but it's a morning dove and a parrot sharing the seed bowl. But they're more likely to fight with other parrots. I mean, every now and then, I've seen them pull on the tail feathers of a morning dove, but they don't attack them, yes. Yeah, early 70s. They're in the book, Tales of the City. Well, there are essentially two species of parrots in the city, essentially. Cherry-headed corn ear here, or red mask parakeet, whatever you prefer. And then the canary wings in the mission. But the flock that I'm studying has that mitered corn ear in it, which is creating the hybrids. Oh, oh, I see what you're saying. No, it varies. Mitereds are very common. Although the flock in San Carlos is blue crown. Mitereds are very common. Cherry-heads are not as common, but they do exist, other flocks, yes. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's how it works. They actually, they're pretty good about it, but it does happen. Yeah. Okay, this is the last question that I'm gonna sign books, yes. There were 26 when I first started feeding them. I would take some, but not a lot, because, okay, when I left, the flock was at around 55 or 60, and when I came back, it was 85. So they didn't need me to grow. But where I will take responsibility is when they first got started, they didn't know the area as well as they do now. So I, they didn't have to work as hard to find food. But if you ask me, am I responsible for the state of the flock now? I don't think so, no. They just, they know where the food is. They're eating, they don't need my handouts. But I probably made it a little easier for them in the beginning. Okay, one last question. Hawks. Hawks get them. And then there's one hawk I see after them every day, and somebody told me he saw that hawk with the parakeets. Okay, thank you.