A bit of news regarding the Monk Parakeets of Ridgefield.
Bill Boyle of the New Jersey Bird Records Committee reports:
"At the Spring 2008 meeting [last month], the committee voted to add Monk Parakeet to the New Jersey State List. The population in Bergen County, which has been present for many years, has been growing and spreading and is unlikely to be extirpated by natural causes."
Click "Continue reading…" for the rest of his comments.
Boyle writes: "A second, smaller colony exists in Middlesex County. The committee would be interested in learning of other nesting colonies that exist outside these areas now or in the future."
Ridgefield has a thriving colony of 30 Monk Parakeets. Click here for a video and previous posts of the Ridgefield parakeets.
Link to an article on Monk Parkeets in New Jersey is here.
It looks like they’ve also moved into Ridgefield Park. I’ve been watching this flock of green and yellow birds than sound, look, and land like parrots fly to and fro for about a year now and today I decided to do a search on green winged, yellow bellied birds in Northern New Jeresy and the Monk Parakeet is what I found. I saw several of them last summer and now there appears to be about 2 dozen of them.
They appear to reside in a tree about a block away and fly over to a tree near my home daily.