Neighborhood Squawk

The Virginian Pilot reports that neighbors in the Larchmont section of Norfolk are at odds over what to do with band of feral parrots.

In the more than a decade that followed, the colorful, conversational birds became popular neighbors to the street’s human residents, and built a communal nest of twigs, which grew to the size of a beanbag chair, on a roadside utility pole.
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Last month the birds may have caused a fire and power outage here. At the least, their nest fueled the blaze.

And that has sparked a dispute among the street’s homeowners, some of whom insist that the rebuilt nest be removed as a fire hazard, others equally adamant that the birds be left alone.

It seem, however, that the Final Solution for the parrots will be up to the local power company rather than the residents.

Dominion halted the nest’s destruction, though it harbored little doubt that the parrots had caused the outage. “They chewed through some of the insulation,” utility spokesman Chuck Penn said Tuesday, “causing some of the wires to come into contact with one another.

“We’re going to be keeping very close tabs on what those birds are doing,” Penn said. “Our approach to it is that we’re going to do everything we possibly can to work around these parrots so as not to disturb what they’ve made their habitat.

But if we continue to have problems in providing service to our customers, we’ll have no choice but to turn to a third party to remove the nest.”

One neighbor, however, seems to have the whole thing in proper perspective:

“Oh, fiddledee dee,” Eunice “Cookie” Pittman , a neighbor who has lived in her house for 63 years , said of such worry. “Squirrels chewed my telephone line. So what are we going to do, go through the neighborhood and kill all the squirrels? While we’re at it, we can kill all the bees and wasps, because they build nests in my awnings. Oh, and children yell and scream and play all the time, and that annoys me, so let’s get rid of the children.”

Sage advice indeed, Mrs. Pittman.