For an Ec(h)o-politics of Noise: The protest songs of “invasive” parakeets

Listening to the calls of parakeets across southern Europe, Nuno da Luz hears colonial legacies and contemporary political struggles over migration and belonging.

Part One

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Recording in National Gardens, Athens

The sounds heard in the background were recorded at the National Gardens in Athens, Greece, late one afternoon, as the sun was setting, in September 2017. Nowadays a public park, it was originally designed as a Botanical Garden belonging to the Old Royal Palace – the building that today houses the Greek Parliament, right in front of Syntagma Square.

In the recording, we hear the strong steps of joggers running past the microphone, the voices of visitors strolling around and the continuous low-frequency hum of city traffic at a distance, with several cars and motorcycles revving up from time to time. Occasionally, cicadas join in. Throughout, the only constant sounds are the high-pitch callings of ring-necked parakeets that nest in large groups in the canopy of tall trees in the park. At that specific moment of that day and year, their songs filled the air and there were almost no other bird sounds accompanying them in that upper register of the frequency range.

Ring-necked parakeets are native to certain parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent and did not found their way to Athens by traditional migratory routes as they’re incapable of flying such distances. After being captured in their endemic habitats to be sold and kept as pets in Europe, and then either escaping captivity or voluntarily released by former owners, many of these birds have since managed to adapt, find shelter, food and partners. They have thus thrived in various foreign habitats around the world. We count several generations in Athens alone, but recordings similar to this one could have been made in many other European cities over the last four decades. Their current numbers are directly linked to their popularity as pets in the 1980s and 90s. The sale of ring-necked parakeets was only recently restricted in the European Union, since they are now classified as an “invasive alien species”. Their presence is also the practical result of escape or release from zoos where they were featured, as it is the case in the National Gardens in Athens or, most strikingly, in Brussels, where an aviary regularly released parakeets into the open over a time period of more than 20 years. ¹

According to ParrotNet, the European network on invasive parakeets based at the University of Kent, United Kingdom, ring‑necked parakeets, as well as the similarly thriving monk parakeets, are among the “worst alien species” ² in Europe since they have

begun to pose problems in urban and rural areas such as disturbance to humans, competition with native wildlife and, increasingly, as an agricultural pest. ³

But their naturalisation and acclimatisation tells us much more about our current environmental predicaments. Again according to ParrotNet:

Farming practices that adapt to global climate change and a warmer Europe facilitate the continued expansion
of parakeet populations, amplifying the problems parakeets pose for European agro-economy. Farming practices will increasingly have to adapt to warmer climates; for example, maize, pecan nuts and sunflower will become more popular crops as mean temperatures rise. Parakeets are widely documented as being a pest of these crops, reducing maize yields by up to 81 percent in their native range. Therefore, climate‑driven expansion of parakeet populations across Europe will place increasing pressure on the economy. ⁴

Their acclimatisation to European territories is taking place in tandem with temperatures rising all around the world, courtesy of the disruptive effect of industrial and extractive activities, and the consequent increase in greenhouse gas emissions. ParrotNet tells us explicitly that as Europe’s climate starts to resemble those in which these birds were originally endemic, there will be no change to the industrialised plantation system that was first responsible for the ravaging of peoples, biodiversity and the environment in those parts of the world, while under European colonisation. Instead, we are seeing efforts to reduce or control parakeet populations while leaving systemic causes for environmental catastrophe unaddressed.

The calls of different parakeets populating the sonic space of European cities attest to ongoing environmental changes and the consequent reduction of ecosystems and biodiversity around the world. The loud sounds produced by these once-domesticated pets turned feral show us both the intended and the unintended shifts resulting from globalisation. Or yet, how old colonial bonds are tangible in European urban environments. The historical process of planting and transplanting humans and non‑humans alike is central to the manifold crises facing us today. And as much as the history of European exceptionalism tries to contain and efface the agency of the displaced and the marginalised, the raucous and noisy song of these “invasive aliens” reclaims another mode of inhabiting and co‑habiting this world.

Part Two

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Recording at the Paseo del Prado, Madrid

Case in point: Madrid. I made this recording one early morning in December 2019, at the Paseo del Prado, one of the busiest avenues cutting through the city centre, hosting both the famous Museo del Prado and the Botanical Gardens as well as City Hall, the Naval Museum and many other institutions. Alongside the Prado Museum we find tall cedar and pine trees, both preferred nesting spots for monk parakeets. Each nest can host up to 40 or 50 different pairs in what can be perceived as parakeet buildings: intricate constructions that can weigh up to 200kg and, as a result, have been deemed a public health hazard. According to the head of Madrid City Hall’s Biodiversity Division, Santiago Soria Carreras:

As well as making unpleasant screeching noises, the monk parakeets transmit diseases to other birds, consume their food and push out other species […] falling nests have not caused any damage to passers-by yet, although the previous local government received 197 [noise] complaints about the birds from residents between January and August of this year. ⁵

Having to carve out their own ecological niches in European urban environments, the monk parakeets do not go unnoticed. Their presence is accompanied by a constant sound volume that even the relentless car traffic of an eight-lane avenue such as Paseo del Prado hardly drowns out. Monk parakeets do not use their calls to send clear one‑way messages, rather as a form of keeping communication channels open and flowing. They keep these channels “hot” by constantly feeding them with signals, indifferent to the signal-to-noise ratio of the medium. Here, noise is the message.

A steady stream amounts to both information and affect: it attests to a healthy exchange and to the soundness of the community. It also means that any transmission drop is heavy with meaning: silence is an important tell-tale as it may imply an impending danger or threat. In the words of the biologist Juan Carlos del Moral, working with the Spanish Ornithological Society seo/BirdLife:

[Parakeets are] very difficult to capture. They’re extremely smart and social animals and they warn each other, so if you capture one from a flock, you will no longer be able to hunt another for weeks. ⁶

Here, misunderstandings that originate in the classic nature/culture divide of Western epistemologies come to the fore: noise grievances filed by Madrid inhabitants with the central administration are being used as one of the many reasons for an extermination program that City Hall expects will reduce the current population by as much as 90 percent. That means the controlled hunting and killing of around 12,000 birds in total.

The current right wing cabinet came to power in May 2019 with the support of the far-right, and this was one of their first environmental measures to be announced. The current pandemic, the public health crisis in Spain, last Spring’s lockdown measures, then court injunctions on the extermination contracts, as well as the Filomena snowstorm that heavily affected Madrid in January 2021, all played into delaying the extermination programme up to June 2021, the time of writing. But the controlled killings of monk parakeets were given the green light by Borja Carabante, the Environment and Mobility Delegate of Madrid’s City Hall, on May 8, 2021. In October 2019, reminding us that these parakeets are classified as “invasive aliens”, and that their numbers are growing rapidly, the same delegate stated:

Those who come from the outside aggressively should not be here, and do not have the same ecological right to life, because they are not where they should be and are causing harm to those who should be there. ⁷

Such clear streaks of human exceptionalism equate conservationist tenets with a necro-biopolitical mandate, and reduce ecological processes to zootechnical management. Here, we can clearly hear the historical echoes of what Ecuadorian researcher Mayra Estevez Trujillo has called the “colonial regime of sonority”. ⁸ Rooted in the historical violence perpetrated on non-white bodies and beings, the colonial regime set the basis for the conceptual separation of peoples and nature. Through the enforcement of white supremacy and Christianity it privileged the part of humanity deemed human and divine-like in its mandate to exploit other people and organisms in the planet. Estevez Trujillo argues that the field of acoustic ecology did not investigate deeply enough the relations of power, domination and control that are at play in South American postcolonial soundscapes: how those environments were sonically transformed by the still‑ongoing silencing of indigenous peoples, by the noises of the extractivist-industrial complex and by the loss of biodiversity and its replacement by monocultural plantations. Or as Spanish researcher and curator José Luis Espejo frames it:

Silence is a cultural construct that does not mean absence of noise, but a system under which to manage it. ⁹

That the same system is still trying to enforce itself, deeming these once‑imported pets as “nuisances”, shows that colonial wounds are far from healed. These birds have travelled the same routes of dispossession and extraction as many other peoples, animals and goods. And they now play an important part in showing that European cities are also historically and biologically “nature”. These urban spaces, usually devoid of other solidarities than those developed through human mediation, have long been thought of as closed off to the outside, to the wild. Cities tend to feature heavily disturbed and impoverished socio‑biological networks, so it is not by chance that these parakeets are now a common feature of early 21st century European urban areas. They have occupied spaces that were already disturbed to begin with, spaces that were biologically impoverished and decreasingly diverse, rendering them more easily invaded by newcomers.

I would argue that this impoverishment can now be loudly heard by way of the parakeets’ calls and cries. Their sounds are a protest song against a historical, economic and political system that has consistently refused to acknowledge them and those like them. A system that has forced displacements and adaptations. Now, by trying to make myself heard among their myriad voices, arguing for their right to make noise and be heard, I wish to engage these green aliens as homegrown resistants – neither exotic nor foreign – that remind us that the outside is within, it has only been hidden or silenced for too long. It should come as no surprise that most of the noise complaints presented by Madrid’s inhabitants regarded their inability to sleep once the monk parakeets started their raucous chorus that augurs and accompanies the dawn every single day.

In the introduction to Sonic Urbanism: The Political Voice, ¹⁰ George Kafka of the &beyond collective reminds us of a popular meme that read “Nature is healing, we are the virus” pasted on top of animals in urban settings, supposedly occupying spaces left empty with the dimming of human activity following the first round of Covid-19 lockdowns in early 2020. When recalling the heightened awareness of the birdsong outside, the text points towards different studies confirming the reduction of ambient noise throughout the world, for at least a short moment in time. Perhaps that drop of six decibels registered by Kate Wagner in Washington D.C. ¹¹ has been felt in other locations worldwide. There are cases where the sudden drop in anthropogenic noise may have felt liberating for several species living under such a constant drone. But again, reverting to a commentary by José Luis Espejo, this sudden drop showed that the actual problem with parakeet noise was not that they were competing with other birds for sonic space, but that they were competing with cars to make themselves heard. ¹²

Part Three

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Recording in Parque da Saúde, Lisbon

In June 2019, I made a series of recordings in the Parque da Saúde, in Lisbon that drives the previous point to the extreme. It now feels incredibly long ago, after a period of roughly two years that feels like a decade. Up until the first lockdown measures were enacted, Lisbon was experiencing a massive influx of tourism that started the moment austerity measures – enforced by lenders including the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union between 2011 and 2015 – were lifted. Following a deep economic recession, Lisbon witnessed a boom in construction and gentrification that was solely predicated on low-cost air travel and the rise in short-term rentals available through Airbnb. The city was being swept by public and private investment exclusively funnelled towards real-estate speculation and holdings.

With the growing international attention and investment, came the relentless rhythm of air traffic and an inevitable increase in air traffic noise: the air approach corridor spans the whole city, flying over some of the most densely populated areas in town. This situation was never addressed by public authorities, nor was its incessant rhythm. While out to record the parakeets heard in the background, I regularly checked the real-time track statuses of arrivals and departures at Lisbon’s airport, with landings and take‑offs taking place every four minutes. That is roughly two minutes between planes alternating on the airport’s sole runway. The same influx of neoliberal free trade – that first brought ring-necked and monk parakeets to Europe – was now drowning out their calls. Most parakeet colonies in Lisbon nest in public parks in the vicinity of the airport, or directly beneath its approach corridor, as can be heard in the recording. With the deafening roar of airplane turbines drowning out all other sounds, parakeets continue to animate their lively ongoing conversation against such noisy and explicit examples of turbo-capitalism. We can hear them as loud resistors that defy all attempts to silence them. They stand against biological despoliation and ecological dispossession, while living right at the centre of the seats of power that, for so many centuries, have tried to eradicate the difference and alterity these parakeets sing. Our old exotic pets – now classified as invasive aliens – may be our best teachers for another way of living together amidst the rubble of history.

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