> When there are many of us there isn't enough space left for them.

Something I’ve always wondered is whether this has to be true, or if we’ve decided as a society that it should be true, and if we decided that we wanted to attract more birds into our world, if we really could.

Pigeon spikes are everywhere in San Francisco. I’ve even seen them positioned on security cameras. Now I get that we have a lot of rats with wings flying around, but that seems like a feast for falcons, if we wanted to employ more falcons as we do around City Hall.

Around the beach I’ll occasionally see hawks, and generally the biggest danger to them comes from the ravens flying around not wanting any hawks. If you go around Golden Gate Park, there’s an enormous variety of bird species flying around and roosting. I’ve seen a turkey vulture roosting on the signs and a goddamned peacock LARPing as a roadrunner in the morning. I am more amazed it has neither been eaten by coyotes nor hit by a car yet. Seriously, I took my first picture of it two years ago and I still see it a few times a month around the same area.

There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself. We just built the Transbay Park (“Salesforce Park” since Salesforce owns the naming rights, but I’ll stick with the generic name), the bus terminal below has just entered service, the park has only been open a bit longer than that and already I see numerous small birds up there every time I go up there.

Down by the waterfront I saw an owl flying around right by Aquatic Park. I was pretty lucky to see it at all since it was going for a kill and the wings don’t make a sound.

This is just in one city! I think if we stopped behaving in an actively hostile way towards birds, save some falconry for population control, we might see the diversity of urban bird populations increase. If we actually introduced niches into our infrastructure for them to roost, managed our urban forests a bit better and planted some more trees while we’re at it, we could maybe even see them thrive here.

>There’s also the parrots of Telegraph Hill, an escaped domestic population that turned wild and has managed to sustain itself.

Speaking of current attitudes towards wildlife, I find it interesting how we are so keen to promote biodiversity but usually unwilling to consider invasive or introduced species as a way of achieving more stable biodiversity. I think with the ongoing threats to our environment and how this impacts us, we will turn more and more to using invasive species to save our natural and urban environments. I hope we stop thinking of nature as a static thing unable to adapt in ways beyond the limited scope of human imagination.

We might come to that, but I think the attitude we have right now is reflective of a very basic fact that we rarely admit to ourselves: introducing new species into an ecosystem adds an additional level of complexity that changes it in ways that are often detrimental, and we are not equipped to even begin to understand how to mitigate the negative effects by managing that much complexity.

In short, we simply don’t understand the ecosystems that exist well enough to begin to try to make any positive changes to it. However, I think the Parrots are okay if they stay in the city because San Francisco is an almost entirely built environment.