IT ALL STARTED with a bird feeder.

Figuring it was time to get to know the local fauna, Mark Bittner put one up in the back yard of his San Francisco rental.

Mark Bittner of San Francisco with a wild cherry-headed conure. (Photo courtesy of Pelican Media.)

Not that Bittner, who lived in a tumble-down cottage on the steep east side of Telegraph Hill, cared all that much about birds. He did not.

It was just that the one-time street musician did not have much else on his plate at the moment. In fact, at 41 and raking in a few thousand dollars a year doing odd jobs, Bittner was still trying to figure out what to do with his life.

"I saw the birds as a diversion, just a hobby while I was trying to figure out what to do next," he said.

Fast forward 10 years. Today, Bittner has a book contract and stars in a documentary by an award-winning filmmaker due out this summer. NPR and the New York Times call him for interviews. He's fallen in love with a woman. His plate is so full, he can barely spare the time for a phone conversation.

What happened? You might say he owes it all to the unexpected guests who showed up at his feeder.

The parrot man of San Francisco
A native of Washington state, Bittner arrived in San Francisco in the early 70s determined to make it as a musician. A limited repertoire, he says, held him back.

"I had two fanatical favorites: Dylan and Van Morrison. I sang their songs exclusively, and I didn't write my own, which doesn't exactly lend itself to club gigs. So the whole thing fell apart on me."

For the next 20 years, Bittner bummed around the Bay Area looking for a new passion. When he set out bird seed that fateful October day back in 1990, Bittner was astonished to see not just the local jays arrive for a snack, but also a handful of noisy green birds with red heads. He knew they were some type of parrot, he just wasn't sure what.

Bittner looked them up in a book and was baffled at first by the variety of common names for the cherry-headed conure, a parrot from Ecuador and northwestern Peru. Red-masked parakeet, cherry-headed parakeet, red-masked conure.

Bittner continued to feed and study the birds. He won their trust by sitting perfectly still. Two birds became four when the first pair had babies, then eight when several other cherry-headeds joined.

Bittner created a Web site (now at Pelican Media) for the flock and began maintaining feeding and sighting journals. To help keep track of individuals, their mates and offspring, Bittner named the birds after authors and fictional characters he admired.

Fame comes calling
By the late 90s, the wild parrot flock of Telegraph Hill had grown considerably in size and reknown. Fellow city dwellers had noticed the cherry-headeds, too, and were sending Bittner excited e-mails, which he posted on his sightings page. People Magazine and CNN showed up on Bittner's doorstep to interview the "parrot man of San Francisco". The flock swelled to 50 birds.

One of Bittner's admirers was Judy Irving, a filmmaker. Irving, whose environmentally themed documentaries have won Emmy and Sundance awards, had been following Bittner's story for years. Now the time seemed right to approach him about putting it on film. Bittner readily agreed.

"I'd been hoping that someone would come along and want to make a short video or something so that I could have a personal memory of the birds," he said. "But the film goes well beyond that.

The "marriage" of Pushkin (top), a cherry-headed conure, to a stray mitred conure produced the plain - but endearingly friendly - Fanny (bottom). (Photo courtesy of Mark Bittner.)

"It was an interesting experience," he said of playing himself. "I'm always curious about how things work, and now I know a lot about how films are made. I was surprised to find that I wasn't nervous about being on camera."

Filming, which took three years, threatened to hit a snag in 1999 when the owners of Bittner's cottage decided to renovate. Bittner had to move in with friends in Berkeley, 15 miles east of San Francisco across the Bay Bridge. However, he was still able to come in for filming every day and still saw the flock on a regular basis.

Today, Bittner is back in San Francisco, living in almost the exact same spot as before. As luck would have it, a rental next door to his old home became available and the owner asked Bittner if he would like to live there, rent-free as a caretaker.

At first, Bittner was afraid the flock would not visit his new digs, an efficiency set among the hills' steep gardens and winding steps that lead to Coit Tower. But he soon discovered he could feed the birds by climbing up on the roof of his bedroom.

Friend of the flock
As the primary observer of San Francisco's flock of wild conures for the last decade, Bittner has gained more insight into urban parrots than perhaps any other layperson.

Once, the profusion of common names for the conures confused him. Now, he has become something of a parrot expert, and terms such as aratinga erythrogenys, the bird's Latin name, roll off his tongue as if he were a seasoned field biologist.

Bittner has noticed that like many feral parrot populations in California, the cherry-headeds favor nonnative vegetation. They nest in pre-existing cavities of the Canary Island date palm, one of San Francisco's many exotic trees. To protect the flock, Bittner keeps these nesting sites a secret. However, he likes to refer to them as The Republic of El Coto, after the area of Peru the birds come from.

The flock ranges over the city's north waterfront, a limited area. When there were only about 50 birds, it used to fly together from November to February then splinter in preparation for the June through August breeding season, said Bittner. Now the flock is so large it rarely flies unified anymore.

Bittner feeds the flock nothing but sunflower seeds. He's quick to acknowledge that's not a good diet for pet birds, but correctly points out that the fatty treats are fine for wild birds because they expend so much energy.

"I've tried to feed them something else but they love them and they can't find them naturally. I've always thought of myself as their French fry stop," he quips.

En masse escape
Where did San Francisco's parrot flock come from? All of the founding members wore leg bands, which leads Bittner to believe they were imported birds who somehow escaped en masse. Today's flock is composed almost entirely of the descendants of those first cherry-headed conures.

Over the years other escaped parrots have joined the flock, but most of the newcomers have not survived. They included two blue-crowned conures, an Amazon, a rosella and a sky-blue budgie Bittner fondly dubbed Theo. "Somebody turned loose an orange-fronted conure because they wanted to get rid of it," he added disgustedly.

Freeing a pet so it can join the flock is "a really bad idea," said Bittner.

Although pet birds "understand the language and go on hawk alerts just like their wild counterparts," they usually succumb to exposure or raptors, said Bittner.

He initially did not consider hawks a serious threat, but changed his mind after watching one catch and kill a newly fledged conure last September.

"Personally, it was horrifying experience," he says.

Olive, Pushkin and Fanny
One outsider who joined the flock and survived was a bird Bittner named Olive. She was an escaped mitred conure, a slightly different species of conure from the cherry-headeds.

After an initial fling with Gibson, Olive paired off with another cherry-headed conure, Pushkin. They've been a couple since 1997 and together have produced numerous clutches of hybrid mitred-cherryheaded babies, including one of Bittner's favorite flock members, a bird named Fanny.

Bittner met Fanny when Olive, her mother, became ill and collapsed on his deck. While Bittner cared for Olive inside his cottage, her mate Pushkin struggled to raise their latest brood alone.

Thanks to extra handouts from Bittner, Pushkin successfully raised all four chicks on the nest and when they fledged, the proud father brought them around to meet their human benefactor. During the visit, one of the youngsters was chased by another bird and flew to Bittner's shoulder for protection. It was Bittner's first contact with Fanny. Somehow, she knew he was a friend.

Mingus, a cherry-headed conure who can no longer keep up with his wild San Francisco flock, peeks out of a nest in Bittner's home. (Photo courtesy of Pelican Media.)

Bittner has sheltered other flock members in his cottage when they needed his help.

One bird's wing was bitten so hard by another it had trouble flying. Another's eye was bloodied in a fight. Still others have come down with mysterious illnesses. Not always able to afford a vet, Bittner has tried to make them all comfortable.

One of his favorite patients was a cherry-headed he named Dogen. After he released her, she would fly over and "see me eating and drop out of the sky for a bite."

Bittner currently keeps two birds that can no longer live outdoors, including a youngster that flew into a glass windbreak. "When he came to it was, 'Hi, Mommy; hi, Daddy!' Bittner jokes.

Despite their displays of trust, the conures are still wild birds.

"They are very afraid of my hands; they'll never let me pet them - put my hand over the back," said Bittner. "If I tried, they would bite me."

A star is born
An exception to that rule is Connor.

"He had obviously been a pet," says Bittner. "He knew the whole thing about being in a house. He got on my finger readily.

"He's a magnificent bird," Bittner adds admiringly. "There's something regal about him, he is very intelligent. I've seen him make decisions about things."

In fact, Connor is the star of Irving's documentary. He got his movie role not only for his sparkling personality, but for his looks.

"People have trouble picking out one bird from a flock," said Bittner. As the flock's sole blue-crowned conure, Connor stood out from the identical-looking crowd of cherry-headeds.

Surprise endings
Bittner's 275-page book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, will be published by Harmony Books a year from now, in spring 2004. Irving hopes to have her film of the same name, which she describes as a celebration of "urban wildness, Bohemian and avian," finished by August.

Both book and movie have surprise endings that Bittner prefers not to reveal. One of the secrets is the identity of his new girlfriend.

What Bittner will say is that he really likes the movie - no big surprise since he stars in it, he jokes - and that other people seem to like it, too.

Last year at a showing of the 95-minute rough cut, "people came up to us in tears. It makes you laugh and makes you cry," he promises. "There are lots of interesting things in the film for people with pet parrots. They can see what they're like in the wild."

The pride of San Francisco
Bittner is so busy writing these days that the flock is on his back burner, such that it is. Instead of feeding the birds several times a day, he has vowed to feed them only once. He doesn't know the flock as well as he used to. Now that it has ballooned to 85 individuals, he can no longer identify each bird by name.

That doesn't really matter, says Bittner. No matter what his future involvement, the flock will thrive. Wild and tough, the birds can forage for themselves.

Regardless, Bittner probably has already done the most important thing he could have for the conures: he has laid a groundwork of positive publicity.

Thousands of fans all over the world now know and love the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill. San Francisco is proud of its newest tourist attraction. If the flock's size or noise ever threatens to become a problem, those advantages should keep it safe from any official backlash.

"Beautiful little friends"
In return, the flock has given Bittner a gift, too. He has finally figured out what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

"I didn't really have a way to make a living that I was enthusiastic about," he says of his years adrift. "I didn't want to just have a career somewhere that I didn't like. I wanted to have something that I loved. It baffled me for a long time."

Thanks to the conures, whom he refers to as "beautiful little friends," Bittner has rediscovered an old passion - writing. "This has brought me back to it," he says. "The flock was the turning point for me."

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About the author
Carla Thornton is editor of ParrotChronicles.com.

ParrotChronicles.com.  March-April 2003. Copyright 2001-2003© All rights reserved