stands as a transcontinental illustration of the adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The very qualities that render these birds sublime from a distance have arguably made them ridiculous at close quarters. Of course this process, like many historical trends, admits of exceptions, and it has developed unevenly. But it has developed nonetheless, with the result that parrots today are more familiar in the home and yet more endangered in the world, more coveted and yet more taken for granted, than ever before. Biologists have catalogued more than 350 species of the bird, with major populations in South and Central America, Australia, Indonesia, India, and West Africa. But a third of these species are now threatened with extinction, and many have already ceased to exist. Less than two centuries ago, parrots inhabited North America in vast numbers. Today the continent’s indigenous parrots are gone. In the meantime, exotic parrot species have been imported to North America from elsewhere. Now these birds, too, are increasingly threatened in their homelands.
Historically, the peoples of the western hemisphere have been unable to resist owning parrots. While other birds, such as ravens and jackdaws, can imitate human speech, parrots receive special treatment, both good and bad, due to the unique range of their vocal abilities. These abilities also raise questions about the intelligence of parrots, questions that remain unresolved to the present day, and that have led people to view the birds in sharply contrasting ways. Of course, other animals, too, have been traditionally credited with intelligence; one medieval bestiary, for instance, claims that “there is no creature cleverer than the dog” (Bestiary 71). But the idea of parrot intelligence inspires a peculiarly broad range of reactions, from religious reverence to contemptuous dismissal. And the association of parrots with exotic locales has led to further associations as well, especially with the conquered peoples of those same locales.
But in 40 million B.C., the historical processes that would produce these developments were still far in the offing, and parrots lived in Britain long before any human being. They were there more than 39 million years earlier than the original Britons, and some 33 million years before the earliest known hominids roamed the earth. They held forth in the cradle of English-speaking culture, where they fed and flocked and nested and reproduced long before that culture itself could even be described as in its infancy. Then, as climates changed and rivers altered their course and tectonic plates shifted, parrots abandoned this corner of the world, and people arrived in their place. When these two groups finally encountered one another for the first time, it would be in an act of war.
Chapter 1
Invasion of the Parrots
Early in 327 B.C., after completing his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great maneuvered his army across the Hindu Kush and into India. When he finally returned homeward, he brought with him, among other things, specimens of a rare, magical bird. Alexander’s major ancient biographer, Arrian, writing some four and a half centuries after the event (c. A.D. 130–140), mentions it as follows: “Nearchus [Alexander’s friend and the admiral of his fleet] describes, as something miraculous, parrots, as being found in India, and describes the parrot, and how it utters a human voice. But I having seen several, and knowing others acquainted with this bird, shall not dilate on them as anything remarkable…. For I should only say what everyone knows” (8.15.8–9). Nearchus’ eyewitness account of the birds is lost,1 and already, in Arrian’s treatment of them, we can see the original wonder they elicited give way to something more like ennui. What was marvelous for a Greek of the fourth century B.C. has become old news for a Roman citizen of the second century A.D. But by discrediting Nearchus, Arrian points to what has changed between Alexander’s day and his own. If things that once seemed miraculous have now devolved into the commonplace, this can only be because Nearchus’ birds were indeed extraordinary—at least enough so for the people of ancient Greece and Rome to want to own them. Before the birds of India can become boring in Europe, they must first become familiar.
This book is about the group of birds thus introduced to Europe, from India, by Alexander and his followers: the order of parrots, called Psittaciformes by biologists. It is also about the process that has rendered these birds commonplace and that now, ironically, bids fair to make them rarer than ever before. The story of their acquisition by the peoples of Europe is lengthy and involved, covering nearly two and a half millennia, and yet in the end it may be as simple as Arrian’s dismissive remarks. At first parrots are exotic and astonishing, credited with marvelous abilities and even associated with the gods themselves. Then they become trivial and ordinary and even annoying. Now they are becoming extinct. Whether or not they actually do so will say as much about us and the world we have created as it does about them.
There is a great deal we do not know about Alexander’s campaign in India; in some cases we do not even know what route he took as he moved through the region. But as it happens, we have a good idea what kinds of parrot he encountered there.2 India is home to only a handful of the parrot species that have proven most popular with bird-owners over the centuries. One of these, and one of only three species that seem to have reached ancient Europe, is a true parakeet (not to be confused with the budgies known by that name in American pet stores). The bird is about two feet in length if you count its foot-long tail, with feathers of a pleasing powder-green color highlighted by a broad collar of black and rose-pink, and a very large, plum-colored beak. As with all parrots, its upper beak is hinged, and its feet are four-toed and zygodactylic—that is, arranged in yokelike fashion, with the outer toes pointing backward and the inner toes pointing forward, giving it the avian equivalent of an opposable thumb. Although it does mimic human speech in captivity, by current standards it is not a terribly gifted talker. Its native range extends from Jalalabad in the northwest to the Mekong Delta in the southeast. Biologists have given it the scientific name Psittacula eupatria (Forshaw 324–35). In English we call it the Alexandrine parakeet.
I think it fitting that this bird bears the name of Alexander the Great, for the story of parrots in the west is connected, from its very beginning, with Europe’s conquest and absorption of other territories. The first part of that story, which is the subject of this chapter, coincides with the initial phase of European military expansion from Alexander to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the late fifth century. During this period—as again later—parrots serve, among other things, to mark European civilization’s successful confrontation with the world beyond its frontiers. This fact helps to explain both the wonder with which Alexander’s Greeks first encounter these birds in India and the casual dismissal the same birds receive from Arrian, for any successful act of conquest and absorption demands that one reduce the foreign to the familiar. Indeed, that very reduction is contained within the name of the Alexandrine parakeet, which transforms it from an exotic beast into part of the legacy of Europe’s first great conqueror.
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Alexander was the only European ruler to establish a military presence in India before the Renaissance. After his death, the classical world’s contact with south and east Asia was mediated by the merchants and peoples of the Silk Road, a lengthy, convoluted network of trade routes that connected Rome in the west with the Han Dynasty of China in the east. Although the great empires at this road’s extremities never met directly, a wide range of goods, parrots among them, traveled it in both directions. Indeed, given the brevity of the ancient European incursion into India, it makes sense that luxury goods from south and east Asia should prove attractive in classical Rome. For apart from their use-value, these goods also perform a kind of symbolic reconquest of lost territory. Lacking an actual Roman administrative presence in India, one might nonetheless recover a piece of India, in the form of its exotic goods, for display within Rome itself. Given the wonder with which Alexander’s Greeks first encountered India’s parrots, the birds naturally become prime candidates for this kind of reacquisition.
And from the first, these birds were associated specifically with India. In fact, no records of parrot species like the African gray and the Senegal survive from classical Europe. These species were both plentiful in sub-Saharan Africa, theoretically well within the trading range of the Roman
