Pretty parakeets are not welcome visitors in the Netherlands, according to officials of the Ymere Foundation, a non-profit housing company that is finding the pesky pollies using their beaks as hacksaws to make room for nests.
Ymere, which renovates and insulates about 1,600 houses a year, says the fist-sized holes leak in cold air and drive up heating bills. The parakeets, which number about 21,000 in the Netherlands, arrived originally from Africa, possibly as pets. Without local natural predators, their numbers are growing.
The company has looked into parakeet-proof material but has not succeeded in finding a winning solution, a spokesperson said: “Those bills are a combination of crowbar, drill and tin snips. They are even taking on stone and aluminum.”
The birds compete for nesting space with local birds which live in hollow trees. They are known to plunder orchards for fruit, and to favor peanuts plucked from urban bird feeders. The Ymere spokesperson says he doesn’t care what measures are taken to control them as long as they leave Ymere’s houses alone.
