If you’ve ever owned birds – and by birds, I mean the big beaky ones – you know they have their own personalities.  I became step-mom to two of these creatures for a number of years.  While the one that talks the most was a troublemaker who will go to anyone, the other is quiet and gravitates mostly to his owner.  I stayed clear of that one.

Which was why I could relate so well to The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.  This documentary tells the story of Mark Bittner, a San Francisco street musician.  In this true story, he’s shown caring for a flock of wild parrots in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco.  He knows the individual personalities of the birds.  Most of the film shows him interacting with the birds and describing their personalities as well as what he knows and suspects of their history.  Although this might be boring to some, anyone who has interacted with birds will find it fascinating.

Just how do these birds native to South America end up in a wild flock in San Francisco?  No one knows for sure.  Rumors abound about their origin.  If you have the chance to google “wild parrots” you’ll find that there are a number of flocks around the country, including a flock of parrots in Brooklyn!  They are all different varieties, and the ones in Telegraph Hill are conures which are mostly green feathers with a red “hood”.

Bittner gives the birds names and introduces them to the viewer so we get to know them.  He describes the pairings that have taken place and his hopes for other pairings.  When a bird disappears, I could feel his sadness knowing that it probably meant they had died.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is also the story of Mark Bittner.  Before he settled into a comfortable job of house-sitting on the Hill where he came across the birds, he ambled through life with no real direction.  Listening to him speak, it’s not that he isn’t intelligent, nor does he come off as being unbalanced in any way.  Having the birds to care for gave him a sense of purpose he never seemed to find before.  He became fairly well-known around the area.  People in the neighborhood sometimes save food for him to feed the birds.  When the documentary was being made about him, he ended up in a relationship with the film’s director, Judy Irving.

The film itself is beautiful.  Irving must have shot a tremendous amount of footage of the birds, both individually and as a flock, to edit it down to the just shy of an hour and a half length.  We get to see the birds show off the personality traits Bittner talks about as well as seeing how local people react to both the birds and Bittner.  She did a terrific job capturing the relationship between man and birds, and the birds adapting to a city environment.

Toward the end, the film takes a bit of a dramatic turn as Bittner learns the home he’s been staying in must undergo a tremendous amount of renovations and he can no longer stay there.  Even city officials worry about the plight of the bird once he won’t be around to care for them every day.  Bittner assures them the birds will be fine.  To find out about what happened after he stopped caring for the birds, you can find some of it in Bittner’s own book or on his webpage at http://www.wildparrotsbook.com/.  In the end, he ended up advocating for a ban on feeding the wild parrots after people began getting carried away and he saw their actions as more damaging to the flock than anything else.

I wish there had been a follow-up to the story or any extras on the disc as that’s my only real complaint.  We were watching the film a second time and I was reading about the events that took place following what was filmed here and wished I could see that as well.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is not for everyone.  I can see how some people wouldn’t appreciate just learning about the birds and their different personalities.  However, I thought it was a beautiful and poignant film about how nature finds a way, even when it’s birds from a warm climate in the middle of a chilly city.