It started in London
Over ten years ago, I was in suburban London and I got a shock; I thought I'd seen a parrot flying wild. I looked again, and this time, I saw two of them. They were about 30 cm (1 ft) long, bright green, with a rose-colored ring around their necks.
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I wasn't hallucinating, what I saw were wild parakeets that had established breeding colonies in London. Formally, they are rose-ringed parakeets or Psittacula krameri. A 1997 survey found there were about 3,500 breeding pairs, with a 2012 survey finding 32,000; these numbers were for London alone. There are likely far more now.
The birds seemed to have started off in south-west London before spreading to other parts of the city. Bear in mind, London has lots of quite large parks in urban and suburban areas that are only a short flight away from each other. Lots of people put out food for the birds, so there's plenty for them to eat.
Parakeets are natively found in a band from sub-saharan Africa to India. Given that they're from a hot climate, the obvious question is, how do they survive the English winters? Part of the answer is the mild British weather; despite being quite far north, the UK climate is strongly affected by the Gulf Stream which gives cooler summers and warmer winters. It rarely snows in the south of England and it rarely gets extremely cold, which means the birds can overwinter without dying off. The other part of the answer is the parakeets' range in their home environment; they're found as far as the foothills of the Himalayas, which are obviously pretty cool.
Jimi Hendrix or The African Queen or...?
The next most obvious question is, how did these parakeets get there? There are some great legends, so I'm going to tell them.
One story says it all goes back to the movie "The African Queen" which was partly filmed in Isleworth just outside London. The legend has it, the production company shipped in parakeets for filming and then let them loose at the end of the shoot. The birds moved to Twickenham (next door to Isleworth), which they found hospitable, and they spread from there.
If you don't like that legend, then maybe you'd like one of the others. Jimi Hendrix is said to have had parakeets when he lived in London in the 1960's. One day, he decided to set them free, and so the wild parakeet population got started.
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There are other legends involving Henry VIII, the Great Storm of 1987, and more. You can read all about them online.
The reality is probably much more mundane. Parakeets were popular as pets. As people got bored of them, the easiest thing to do is just release them. With enough people releasing birds, you've got a viable breeding population.
Talking
Parakeets are famously noisy birds, so they just add to the din in an already noisy city. Notably, parakeets can mimic human speech very clearly and are among the best talking parrots. It's a bit odd to think there are thousands of wild birds in London capable of mimicking human speech; maybe they'll have cockney accents.
Glasgow
By 2019, the parakeets had made their way north to Glasgow and set up home in Victoria Park, and from there, they've been colonizing Scotland. The population in Glasgow had the distinction of being the most northerly parrot population anywhere in the world, but it now looks as if the birds have moved even further north.
Here's a map from the NBN Atlas (https://species.nbnatlas.org/species/NHMSYS0000530792) showing current confirmed and unconfirmed sightings of the parakeets in the UK.
Dublin
Parakeets were first spotted in Dublin around 2012. By 2020, they'd started spreading outside Dublin into the surrounding countryside and towns.
As one of the local commentators said, the fact the parakeets are bright green seems appropriate for Ireland.
How did the parakeets get to Dublin? Bear in mind, Jimi Hendrix didn't live in Dublin and "The African Queen" wasn't shot there. Of course, they could have flown there from London, but the Irish Sea is a rough sea and it's a long way to fly across open water. The most likely explanation is the most mundane: people releasing their pets when they got bored of them.
Belfast
Recently (2025), parakeets have been spotted in Belfast. Only a small population of 15 or so, but they're there. If you want to go see them, head up to the Waterworks Park in the north of the city.
They're likely to have spread up from Dublin rather than having spread across the Irish sea.
Brussels sprouts
It's not just the UK and Ireland who are host to the green invaders; there are are something like 200 populations of parakeets in Europe. Brussels has them too, plus Alexandrine parakeets and monk parakeets.
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It is credible that parakeets could have spread from the UK across the channel. You can clearly see France from Kent and birds regularly make the crossing. However the timing and distribution doesn't work. What's much more likely is the accidental or deliberate release of pets.
It's not just the UK, Ireland, and Belgium that have parakeets, they've spread as far as Poland (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381577380_Parrots_in_the_wild_in_Polish_cities). The Polish article has the map above that reports on known parakeet populations in Europe. It's a little behind the times (the Irish parakeets aren't there), but it does give you a good sense of how far they've moved.
This is not good
Despite their cuteness, they're an invasive species and compete with native bird populations. Both the UK and Ireland are considering or have considered culls, but as of the time of writing, nothing has been decided.
The key Belfast question
Are you a Catholic parakeet or a Protestant parakeet?
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