One day after lunch a friend of mine, Denis, asked me if I would like to take a bus to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. It was a beautiful sunny day and I liked the idea. We took a bus to Washington Square and transferred to bus no. 39 to Coit Tower. Coit Tower has many murals that remind me of the artist Diego Rivera and I always like taking my time studying them.
This time I discovered that in one of the murals a worker had a book in his back pocket and you could see part of the title sticking out. It said Lenin. I always see something in the murals I have never seen before. After browsing a little while longer, Denis said “Would you like to walk down the Greenwich steps by Levi Plaza?” So we started walking. As we were walking down the steps, a flock of squawking birds flew in the trees.
There were some tourists also walking as well. They got very excited and I said to Denis, “What’s going on?” He said that these are the parrots of Telegraph Hill and there is a movie out about them. I had not heard of them but became very curious. Sometime later Denis and his good friend Hedi invited me to go to see the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.
I loved the movie. Shortly after that my tutor Darin gave me the book. I must have told him how much I enjoyed the movie and my trip to Telegraph Hill. I read the book and learned a lot from Mark Bittner's writing. Mark is a very interesting person and a great storyteller.
At first, Mark observed the parrots from a distance. One day on a whim he bought a bag of mixed wild bird seed. He put the seeds in a bowl and many birds came to eat the seeds but the parrots did not come. The next time he bought seed he bought straight sunflower seeds.
The birds came again and then a parrot came to the bowl to eat. Mark was excited and remained very quiet. The parrots had never come that close to his house before. In a few minutes two more parrots came to eat from the bowl. This was the start of Mark feeding the parrots.
More parrots came every day. Mark started recognizing them. He gave them names.
He especially liked a blue crown conure. Conure sounds like Connor so he named him Connor. Connor was the first parrot he named. Catherine was a blue crown and she was the second parrot he named. He named her after an unrequited love.
The third parrot was a pugnacious cherry head. He named him Sonny after the character Sonny Corleone in the Godfather. Other cherry head names were funny and literary,
and most of the parrots were cherry heads.
I loved Mark’s sense of humor and his tenderness. Some of the cherry heads’ names were
William Blake, poet; Gary Snyder, poet; Yosemite, after Yosemite Sam; Mandela, after Nelson Mandela; Paco, after the flamenco guitarist Paco De Liciale; Chomsky, named in honor of brilliant intellectual dissident Noam Chomsky; and Marlon, after Marlon Brando. Mark has pictures in the back of his book of all the birds he named and some stories about them. Sometimes Mark named the parrots and found out later they were a different sex and had to rename them.
I have started observing birds in a different way since I have read the book. One day I was going to lunch on Laguna Street and a hawk came flying out of a hedge with a pigeon in his mouth. That was the first hawk I had ever seen in San Francisco.
My friend Denis had never seen a hawk before either. On the No. 3 bus inbound coming from lunch I looked up and saw a hawk circling in the clear December sky. I wanted Denis to see the hawk--he was four seats in front of me. I yelled out, "There's a hawk Denis, circling.” and he saw it." I was a little embarrassed but a woman next to the door asked me what kind of hawk it was. I said, “I am not a birder.” a phrase which I learned from Mark's book. A man in front of me said it was a red tailed hawk. It was like the whole bus was getting involved. Don’t you just love San Francisco? Thank you Mark Bittner for the book and Judy Irving for making the movie.
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