Was Jimi
Hendrix responsible for the bright-green tropical birds’ presence in the
capital? Or was it Katharine Hepburn?
Thu 6 Jun
2019 07.30 BSTLast modified on Thu 6 Jun 2019 07.32 BST
Electric
Ladyland wasn’t the only thing Jimi Hendrix released
in 1968. One day in that tumultuous year he left his flat on Brook Street,
Mayfair, and strolled down nearby Carnaby Street with a birdcage in his hands.
I like to think that he was dressed in a tasselled jacket and flares, his
favourite Fender Stratocaster slung across his back. Or perhaps he travelled
incognito, in a trenchcoat and dark glasses. Either way, somewhere on that
street, the heart of Swinging London at the height of peace and love, he opened
the door of the cage and unleashed two bright green birds: Adam and Eve, a
breeding pair of ring-necked parakeets.
As they
vanished, a flash of tropical colour against the grey sky, passersby merely
shrugged: just more hippy weirdness. Was it a psychedelic stunt? A symbolic
gesture of freedom? The result of a week-long drugs bacchanal? No one really
knows. What we do know is that this incident is the indisputable
origin of London’s population of feral parakeets, which now number in the tens
of thousands and have spread from Hounslow to Haringey, Croydon to Crouch End.
Unless
that story is not true, and actually London’s parakeets arrived in 1951 with
Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. The Hollywood stars were in town
filming The
African Queen at Isleworth Studios (or Shepperton Studios, depending
on who you ask). A romantic adventure set in the equatorial swamps of east
Africa, the film required exotic extras, so a flock of ring-necked parakeets
was unwisely brought on set. Whether these resourceful birds escaped before,
during or after filming has not been definitively established – they certainly
don’t appear in the film, which I have watched frame by frame – but what lies
beyond all reasonable doubt is that these cinematic escapees were the
progenitors of today’s population.
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