Movie Review: "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill"
***** out of *****
Utterly delightful to watch! It may be clearly a low-budget film (part of it being culled from home movies taken by Mark Bittner, the main *human* focus of the film, who co-authored the book it was based on), but it's clearly a labor of love, following the antics of a flock of cherry-headed conures that naturalized themselves among the native wildlife of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Bittner, a local eccentric who had come to the city as a young man hoping to follow his dream to be a musician, describes himself as having "a lot of time on his hands" in between the odd jobs he runs to support himself... but this "time on his hands" gave him the unique oppurtunity to notice a flock of parrots that had taken up residence in amongst the sparrows and scrub jays roosting in the neighborhood. The more he watched them and the more the birds grew accustomed to his being around them, the more he noticed each bird had a distinctive personality. He started naming them -- most notable in the flock are "Mingus", a clown who loves to dance when Bittner sings; "Connor", a cuddly curmudgeon who looks out for the younger members of the flock; and the delightful couple he called "Picasso and Sophie" -- and even looking out for the little rascals. Of course, some otherwise well-intentioned environmental "experts" have wanted to see the birds relocated, lest they become a threat to the local wildlife, but as the film shows, even though the parrots have successfully adapted to the climate and are even breeding, they share the same struggles to survive as the local birds do.
Utterly delightful to watch! It may be clearly a low-budget film (part of it being culled from home movies taken by Mark Bittner, the main *human* focus of the film, who co-authored the book it was based on), but it's clearly a labor of love, following the antics of a flock of cherry-headed conures that naturalized themselves among the native wildlife of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Bittner, a local eccentric who had come to the city as a young man hoping to follow his dream to be a musician, describes himself as having "a lot of time on his hands" in between the odd jobs he runs to support himself... but this "time on his hands" gave him the unique oppurtunity to notice a flock of parrots that had taken up residence in amongst the sparrows and scrub jays roosting in the neighborhood. The more he watched them and the more the birds grew accustomed to his being around them, the more he noticed each bird had a distinctive personality. He started naming them -- most notable in the flock are "Mingus", a clown who loves to dance when Bittner sings; "Connor", a cuddly curmudgeon who looks out for the younger members of the flock; and the delightful couple he called "Picasso and Sophie" -- and even looking out for the little rascals. Of course, some otherwise well-intentioned environmental "experts" have wanted to see the birds relocated, lest they become a threat to the local wildlife, but as the film shows, even though the parrots have successfully adapted to the climate and are even breeding, they share the same struggles to survive as the local birds do.