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Message: <blockquote data-quote="London Birder" data-source="post: 1346772" data-attributes="member: 1712">Hi Kathy,* ... I never realised that they have existed in Hyde park for so long - will let OH know the news.Yes, afraid so, but mainly in adjacent Kensington Gardens (btw who is OH? A fellow patch-birder maybe?).*True they are deviating into behaviour which is not acceptable as it causes hardship for British birds, people and buildings. They are becoming an expensive liability to all now! They might be the new future garden pest that no-one wants along with our Grey squirrels - once they know our feeders are there that is us snookered.I tend to agree with this and have to wonder if Ray Reardon or Steve Davies (assuming the Blackpool panto season hasn't already claimed them) would help us organise a sponsered air-strike on the lime-green hun.*I think a cull would be hard as they are so so fast (so I have been told).So fast and agile in fact that about 12 years ago I thought I'd scored myself a pratincole over a London site that shall remain nameless, until I said to myself 'erm no, its a parakeet you bloody eejit'. Oh how I internally guffawed at that, thankfully private, faux pas.In my humble opinion I think the RNP population has now expanded to the point that the economics of eradication will make the Ruddy Duck cull seem like a day out for one at Poundland. Parakeet behaviour tends to negate them having a kip on a lake and sitting nice and still for the funny man with the bad gun. This alone presents in excess of 20,000 individual problems in the London area.The credit crunch may be the catalyst that's required to enable the parakeet population to explode exponentially into truly horrifying and engorged Hitchcockian hordes intent on dealing out death and destruction. As governmental departments are forced to tighten their belts fiscally at an ever more frightfully savage pace, funding for parakeet ecological monitoring and evaluation, never mind culling, will come to shuddering halt. They shall, before long, number in the hundreds of millions and will sweep across the country ravaging cereal crops, grain silos, orchards, greengrocer shops, bird tables, children's school lunches and senior citizens' fat-balls. All that will be left will be a broken and barren landscape, devoid of everything except our parakeet overlords and the legions of the disposessed. How long before they acquire a taste for human blood? What the hell do we do then!? Who could've thought it possible that sub-prime mortgage lending in the USA could, at least in theory, lead to ecological ruin on my already impoverished patch and the extirpation of my Nuthatches. Naturally enough, this displeases me so, for this transgression, I may invade America.*Must be another way to deal with them. It would have to be a method that would be agreed by all and that would be a difficult task.William Shatner would know how to deal with this impending disaster Kathy, had he been born a concerned and serious-minded birder like us as opposed to a fantastic actor/singer and all round top bloke of course.*Inland Seagulls are considered a pest in many cities and no-one wants to be responsible for reducing their number and that is a whole other issue.Please say it isn't so Kathy ... gulls are my favourite birds and if I even suspect they are being molested by ne'er-do-wells I'm highly likely to invoke the malignent spirit of Thayer (the Slayer) utilising the medium of Strongbow Ciders and the Dennis Waterman back catalogue.</blockquote>

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