this is video my friend in Chicago made. She says they have tons of them in the wild.
Very interesting!
I found an article about them.
http://chicagoist.com/2013/03/19/chicag ... hp#photo-1

We've got Parakeets in Belgium as well.

A group of about 45 was released in the wild from a zoo-keeper in Brussels somewhere in 1975.
They survived and are now populating other areas.

Here's a video from (in dutch) about it:
http://nieuws.vtm.be/moet-je-zien/59996-halsbandparkiet-verovert-vlaanderen

Or here on youtube (you can't see it's Brussels but hey)
- also the voice you hear speaks Dutch but with a dialect used in The Netherlands

Or here:

The Belgian birds look like ringnecks. The Chicago birds are quaker parrots, which are very successful at surviving in northern US cities. The flock in Brooklyn might be the most famous one: http://brooklynparrots.com/ But there are several others.

They're a major nuisance to the electric company. Unlike most parrots, quakers build large communal nests, and they like to do it on power poles which tends to short out the system and cause power outages. The power companies usually dealt with it by killing the birds, but that made people angry so now many of them have started setting up platforms for the birds to use instead of the utility poles.

Nest on a power pole.


Nest on an "alternative" platform.

They say that there are feral lovebird flocks here in Arizona but I've never seen them. Cavity-nesting birds around here use holes in saguaro cactus instead of tree holes.

Wow all very interesting....
We only have normal wild birds....
Plenty of Red Kites... started with a pair...
Counted around 30 today....a rather large bird....
But beautiful to watch.....

I love wild parrots. I would kill to have them but we just have pigeons here.

This is very interesting. Thanks for posting.

I bet there are TONS of feral parrots in Florida. The climate is so favorable for them that I can't imagine it being otherwise. Here's a website about some of them, and if you go a-googling you'll find more. http://floridaswildparrots.blogspot.com/

I wounder why they are known to people of Chicago as "monk parakeets" (some articles and videos refer to them as monk parakeets while others call them quakers). I hope green color doesn't makes them more susceptible to predators' attacks. How do birds see different colors?
Lovebirds in Arizona look super cute in cactus!
Belgium birds are cute, too!

I believe you mentioned you have wild ringnecks there sometime in the past?

We have a flock of wild conures in San Francisco. Don't know if they're still there or not. That could've been a while ago. They're mostly cherry heads.