Amsterdam VS. birds

The rose-ringed parakeet, a feathery friend here in Amsterdam. If they are very quiet, you can barely see them because of their green colour. But being silent isn’t their strongest point. A lot of people here in the Netherlands don’t like them anymore. You can even say that there is a war going on between the parakeets and (older) inhabitants of the bigger cities.

Nobody knows the exact year, but somehow a couple of rose-ringed parakeets escaped from their aviary and flew away. The previous owner didn’t do anything to get them back and maybe he thought they wouldn’t survive the weather of the Netherlands, since it is a lot colder here than it is in the natural habitat of the parakeets which is Africa and South-Asia.
But the parakeets were smarter, or their evil masterminds. You can pick one. The point is they survived, and now the population grew to four thousand of them only in Amsterdam. They also decided to live in Rotterdam, Den Haag, Haarlem, etc, and in Belgium, England, Germany and other ones I don’t know so fast.

Aah well...somehow people started to hate those birds, most of them are owners of such small gardens which are far away from their home and for which I don’t know the English word right now (what?? I’m from the Netherlands!!). And of course you have the ‘older people’. Funny enough, you would expect them to love birds, and most of them do. But in ‘Het Parool’, one of the newspapers here, there was a letter send by one of the readers. He asked people to support him in stealing the eggs of the parakeets and help him. He seriously wrote: ‘Everyone should grab a ladder to climb up the trees and get their eggs, just like we used to do with the eggs of lapwings.’ What was his reason: the cycle path beneath the tree he was talking about wasn’t red anymore but white because of the bird poop. THAT was his reason to exterminate the populations. How childish can you be??
In my defence, since I am only talking about the parakeets and not about the lapwings, I didn’t know anything about those lapwing eggs.

Am I the only person who doesn’t understand those people who want to ‘exterminate’ the parakeet populations?? Maybe it is because I really like those birds. When I’m cycling to school very early, they are the only ones that are awake and sometimes they even fly along with me for a couple of meters. And not so long ago, during some kind of mini-storm, a branch broke and apparently the ‘wound’ left on the tree was full of ‘spilling’ tree sap. The effect of this tree sap was that the tree, and especially the ‘wound’ was covered in green feathers and beaks. The birds really liked the tree sap. It was really funny to see but when I came near to the tree, it became more fun. My head was at the right height for the tree sap. I was ‘attacked’ by several birds who had I fight for the spot on my shoulders and head to drink tree sap, and at the end they were even looking at me if maybe I had something to eat. One of them stole my leftover lunch. And even with that fact, that some bird stole my lunch, I still love them! And this will not be my last blog about birds! Poor readers :P