You’ve likely spotted them in a Paris park, on a tree-lined street, or soaring above Île-de-France. With their bright green plumage, red beaks, and powerful cries, the green parakeets are hard to miss. They are more precisely ring-necked parrots, a species native to sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, today found in several major European cities.
In Paris and the Île-de-France region, their presence is typically linked to parrots that escaped from transport containers used for commerce, near Orly and Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airports. While there were reports of breeding as far back as the 1970s, the formative episodes for the current population in Île-de-France are mainly tied to the 1990s around these two airports, according to the LPO. The species then gradually expanded across the entire region.
To learn more about how they arrived in the Paris region, also check out our article on the unusual origin of the green parakeets spotted in Paris.
If these exotic birds have managed to establish themselves for the long term, it’s because the city offers them ample resources: trees for nesting, hollows, communal roosts, relatively mild temperatures, and food available year-round. Parks, gardens, cemeteries and tree-lined avenues thus provide favorable habitats for their expansion.
The ring-necked parakeet is today classified among invasive alien species. A ministerial decree dated February 14, 2018 prohibits, among other things, its introduction into the wild in metropolitan France. This designation doesn’t mean we should panic at every sighting of parakeets, but it signals a monitoring concern: the species can clash with certain native birds that also rely on hollow cavities to nest.
Its exact impact on biodiversity in Île-de-France remains nuanced. The LPO notes that the available studies do not always allow drawing a conclusion about a large-scale, widespread effect on local species. By contrast, its presence can generate noise disturbances, particularly around roosts where the parakeets gather in large numbers at the end of the day.
So why are there so many perruches vertes à Paris? Because an accidentally introduced exotic species has found in Île-de-France an urban setting that suits it well. The result: these birds, once a novelty, are now part of the Parisian and Île-de-France landscape.
Sources: LPO, French Office for Biodiversity, ministerial order of February 14, 2018.
