Winging it: How colony of wild parakeets continues to thrive in Lombard

Among the cadre of birds that dart along the tree line bordering the Great Western Trail near Lombard is a green-plumed flock that looks completely out of place.

That’s because they are.

For decades, a colony of monk parakeets — traditionally native to South American countries such as Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina — have called the ComEd substation that abuts the Great Western Trail along Swift Road home.

“They’re able to survive in Chicago not despite our equipment, but because of it,” said Sara Race, ComEd’s senior manager of environmental management.

The parakeets’ nests, which often are quite large and can house multiple families of the colony, are kept warm in the frequently brutal Chicago-area winters by the power equipment.

Race said at least 10 ComEd power stations are home to the parakeets in the Chicago area.

“They’re actually fairly ubiquitous in the Chicago area,” said Matt Igleski, executive director of the Chicago Bird Alliance. “They’re one of the most widespread, non-native parrots in the U.S.”

Igleski credits the birds’ heartiness and the fact they build their own nests for their ability to adapt and thrive in a different climate.

Few, if any, of the feral parakeets currently nesting in Lombard and elsewhere in the Chicago area have any connection to the rainforests their ancestors came from.

And they certainly didn’t migrate here.

But that’s the only thing experts know about how the parakeet colonies arrived to the region.

“They’re a pet-trade species, so they’re legal to own,” Igleski said. “I’ve heard a few different stories about how they got here, either let go intentionally or by accident. I’m not sure anyone knows.”

Former University of Chicago professor Steve Pruett-Jones studied the various monk parakeet colonies in the Chicago area for years and co-authored a 2011 paper on the 40-year history of the birds here. Pruett-Jones and the other researchers were never able to pinpoint how the parakeets came to be.

“Throughout the 1970s there were scattered reports of (monk parakeets) in Chicago and in surrounding communities,” the report reads, “but none of the known nests persisted and the birds either died or moved elsewhere.”

It wasn’t until 1979, when a massive nest was discovered in a park in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, that the birds seemed to show signs of thriving in the wild locally, Pruett-Jones said. By the 1990s, the Hyde Park colony had ballooned to more than 200 parakeets, which eventually began spreading out to other areas.

“As regards to monk parakeets in Lombard, they have been there since the 1990s, but not every year,” Pruett-Jones said. “It appears that they are becoming more common now, but they got to Lombard through dispersal from the greater Chicago region.”

There are about seven active nests in Lombard with about 25 birds, Race said.

And while it’s not exactly a symbiotic relationship, she noted many ComEd workers appreciate the uniqueness of the bird’s proximity to their work stations, even if they can sometimes be a pest.

“We let them be unless they’re causing an issue,” she said. “Unfortunately, birds and power lines don’t always go hand in hand, but we work hard to protect as many birds as we can. Very rarely do we have to remove a nest.”

Because the parakeets are considered an invasive species, there are no bureaucratic hoops the power company has to hop through to move nests. And despite that designation, experts contend the birds haven’t had any negative ecological effect.

“They’re not a problem to our native fauna,” Igleski said. “They’re not excluding native species from existing.”