The parakeets
I walk around a deserted Sunday morning in Rome, also to recover from a relatively sedentary day (five gazebos: Sulmona, Ortona, Francavilla, Pescara, Avezzano, between which I necessarily had to travel by car). In the dead silence I am disturbed by an ungraceful cry. I raise my eyes to the sky, already knowing what I will see: the clumsy flight of a parakeet, I don't know if monk or collared, because from afar I can't see its beak.
Once upon a time, waking up in Rome was a different experience.
The redstart began before the light , the blackbird added flutingly, the wren intervened shrillly, with the reinforcement of the robin, and then the chaffinch. The background noise of the city, the traffic of the ring road, the honking of the parents stuck in front of the school entrance took over in crescendo, which prevented us from appreciating the inexhaustible mimetic capacity of the starling (misunderstood and unrecognized genius). It's called, or rather it was called, biodiversity, that thing that the left likes so much when it concerns animals, with particular attention to those who are pains in the ass (case in point: the clever deer, one of which no later than a couple of weeks ago wanted to sit in the car instead of Scarpetta di Venere, but entered through the windshield, given that its nature as an even-toed ungulate precluded it from efficiently managing the door handle: it would also be a problem for its distant cousin dolphin, who, however, strangely, doesn't bother); yes, the same biodiversity that the same left disgusts and has contributed to destroying in infinite other fields, from banks, to commerce, to culture, in short: to humanity (ours).
It is not clear where these illegal aliens came from, or rather: it is not clear how they arrived, because from where we know, we know where they are a native species, and it is possible to have only one certainty: that with their forces here, alone, they would never have managed to get there, even though in the abstract they had good reasons to try, because the very fact that they have become a hegemonic species here demonstrates that here, unlike at home, they have no natural antagonists, and indeed they exploit the ecological niches of our native (for example, of the spotted woodpecker). In short: even parakeets flee from war (with tree snakes), poor things! They also flee from the dictatorship, that of the human being, who, inexplicably impatient of seeing their crops destroyed, in clear violation of the "Civitaluparella Convention on the rights of pain-in-the-ass birds" (a fundamental source of supranational law, signed on October 14th 2011 by the high representatives of the member states of the non-useful Organization), shoots at them when it can (i.e. more or less everywhere, given the standards of those regions).
So what do you do, don't you welcome them, poor things!? Don't let him raze any form of life NSGC (but yes, come on: let's also abandon ourselves to the European delirium of acronyms), aka ΙΧΘΥΣ, for our friends "er Pesce", has given us to brighten up our days!? Destroying other bird species is their right, as a bird species, right!? It is Loretta the parakeet's right to identify with a peregrine falcon: it is her right as a psittacine !
It's globalization, baby! Card wins, card loses. Indeed, parakeet wins, blackbird loses. With what gain for the surrounding environment will those equipped with ears be able to appreciate, just as those equipped with nostrils can appreciate what the gain has been in replacing the fragrance of bakeries, pastry shops and takeaways, of their bread, their sweets, their skewers, with the internationally homogeneous stench of the nice kebab.
(… best wishes, Matteo!… )
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2025/03/i-parrocchetti.html on Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:41:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.