Do not dismiss this post as a silly little story about a tiny parakeet. This is a big story about a big bird. This is a much larger bird than you would think to be carrying the parakeet name, at sixteen inches in length. We found this bird while birding at the Hart Memorial County Park in Bakersfield California yesterday. It was quite by accident, and I took a photo hoping to learn more about the bird, and it turned out to be a new Life Bird for us. Not much can be learned from looking at bird guides, but by searching the Internet specifically for Bakersfield, I learned it is a pretty big story. In 1977 a huge wind storm of 100 miles per hour in the area broke apart a private aviary and released some birds including two pair of Rose-ringed Parakeets. They were able to successfully reproduce and today there are in excess of 3,000 birds completely living a natural life in Kern County Birders from all over the world travel to Bakersfield to seek out this large beautiful parakeet. We were amazingly lucky to just stumble on this bird in the park. True this is not a native species to North America, but like other immigrants to this country, their numbers are so large they should not and can not be denied.
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