The whimsy and visceral charm evoked by a recent picture taken of flocking parrots backdropped by San Francisco scenery is hard to convey with just words.
When a collection of parrot feeders was installed across Ina Coolbrith Park, the slanted greenspace quickly became a hotspot for San Francisco’s official animal — the cherry-headed conures, which now number in the hundreds. These invasive birds from Ecuador and Peru are believed to originate from a small number of released pets, released sometime in the early 1990s. (Genetic testing later proved this to be true; all of San Francisco’s free-flying parrots are closely related and come from a stock of less than perhaps a dozen birds.)
View this post on Instagram
Their squawking and tropical plumage are dazzling, contrasted by the urban, temperate city they now call home. It’s poetic; San Francisco has long been a home for freaks, outcasts, and misfits who struggled elsewhere, but found community within the city’s fifty-plus hills.
Recently, a San Francisco shutterbug snapped a picture that’s garnered widespread praise (and accompanying virality) on social media for its composition, timing, and, for lack of a more nuanced term, vibe. The subjects of the picture? A flock of cherry-headed conures photographed mid-flight … backdropped by iconoclastic San Francisco details.
“This iconic intersection always makes me stop and want to take a photo,” Urvashi, a prominent SF-based photographer and media photographer. The corner previously in question is Montgomery and Green Streets, an elevated smattering of concrete and asphalt off the base of Telegraph Hill. (Fun fact: This particular block of San Francisco is also one of the most walkable, scoring a near-perfect rating from Walk Score.)
Parrots regularly frequent this area, sitting as a favorable place for roosting and feeding amongst the surrounding dense greenery. Uvrashi serendipitously found herself amid a flock of these birds, squawking in the preservational distance. Her husband was driving through the intersection at the time when she quickly unholstered her camera, cranked up the shutter speed in hopes of clearly capturing them in the air, and shot away.
The results were postcard-worthy — fridge-real-estate worthy, sent to your Fox News-watching aunt worthy (as a means to gloat). Urvashi caught a flock of no less than thirty (forty?) of these vociferous birds flying right behind a backdrop of the San Francisco Bay and Bay Bridge, their vibrant greens and reds contrasted by the somewhat muted orange house behind them — “I love how the green looks against the orange of the house,” she continues.
If the house pictured looks familiar, you’d be right to think so; it was Michael Douglas’ home in the movie Basic Instinct.
All that’s left now is to DM her on Instagram and see if she can make a print of what’s now our favorite picture of SF’s iconic, symbolic parrots ever taken.
Feature image: Courtesy of Instagram via [at]storiesinsf
