Murcia City Council launches a control plan for the Argentine parrot

Do not be fooled by its cute image. As a good exotic and invasive species, the Argentine parrot brings with it a whole battery of problems to those parts of the Spanish geography where it threatens to settle and proliferate. “They cause damage to the orchard and crops, since they feed by pecking a little of each fruit and leaving them useless for marketing,” explains Antonio Hernández, responsible for monitoring birds with the Society, from the Association of Naturalists of the Southeast (Anse). of Ornithology.

Hernández also recalls that the large size of their nests makes them dangerous in the event of possible landslides and that their songs, which are more like “shrieks”, can be very annoying for the neighbors, since they “generate a brutal shouting”. And all this without forgetting that it is a species that can carry diseases transmissible to humans.

For all this and to prevent the existing colony in the municipality of Murcia from growing and being uncontrollable, the Department of Health has decided to act on it, “before its management and control becomes much more difficult”, according to the mayor of the branch , Esther Snowy. In this way and in the first place, the Consistory is intervening on the spawning, sterilizing the existing eggs in the nests. This prevents the viability of the embryo, but does not stop incubation, so that the couple does not carry out a replacement clutch. Action has been taken on 12 nests located next to the Malecón promenade, sterilizing the 72 eggs that were in them and removing one of the nests, which was on said promenade, to prevent its possible fall.

In addition, the capture of adult specimens by various methods is planned. However, the main sources of proliferation of these birds in the Region are currently located in San Javier and Cartagena. The second national census of the species, which is being prepared these days, will put figures to a problem on the rise.