Birder Searches San Francisco for the City’s Famous Flocks of Wild Red-Masked Parakeets

Ryan Sallmann of Badgerland Birding explored two of San Francisco‘s urban parks to track down the famous yet elusive flocks of wild red-masked parakeets. While these birds aren’t native to the city, they’re well known throughout the Bay Area.

San Francisco has become known for a population of interesting birds: Red-masked Parakeets (also known as Cherry-headed Conures). This population started from released or escaped birds, but now they can be found living right in the city. While in San Francisco, I went to see if I could find them!

The city loves its noisy green neighbors so much that the Board of Supervisors made the wild parrot San Francisco’s official animal in 2023, two decades after the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill made the flock local celebrities.

Along the way, Sallmann identified other local bird species before he spotted a lone feral parakeet hidden in the thick leaves of a park tree. He then visited such iconic city locations as Chinatown and the Golden Gate Bridge, but didn’t spot any more parakeets.

It was up in this tree behind me that’s so thick, and I went underneath it and looked up and happened to get a glimpse of a shape that looked parrot-like. And I watched longer and then I caught a glimpse of a parrot bill and then caught a glimpse of the red on the face. So, that’s my lifer red-masked parakeet in San Francisco, one of the few places you can find them. … So I think that I’m going to call it on the parrots. I was happy to get that one sighting still.

Sallmann and his brother Derek previously shared a handy guide to 25 common bird calls of the Central and Eastern United States.