The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
2005: Judy Irving
Rated G – 83 minutes
Vault Rating: 7.5
I sat down the other night with Mrs. Vault and Vault Jr. and stuck today’s feature documentary into the grinder and the effect was to warm a cold winter night.
“The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” is director Judy Irving’s study not so much of a flock of wild parrots which have taken hold in a neighborhood in San Francisco, but of the homeless musician who is drawn to them.
Mark Bittner lives on the kindness of others. He life is unencumbered by many of the things that so weigh others down and so he is truly free. He is described as a bohemian kind of St. Francis of Assisi who adopts the parrots as he searches for meaning in his life. He is kindly, erudite and wondering where his life will lead. And if you walk up Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, you are likely to find him covered with wild parrots, feeding and fending for them, talking to them and tending to their sick.
There is an early sequence of a passerby, a very buttoned down sort of man, who just cannot understand what he’s seeing. He wants to think the birds are tame (they are not) and that the only relationship he’s viewing is between hungry birds and sunflower seeds. He leaves puzzled. We viewers stay on to find out more.
The birds, we are told, may have been escaped exotic pets and are certainly not native to the colder climes of San Francisco. Yet they have adapted and somehow flourished and, over the course of a year, Bittner, who has lots of time to spare, ingratiated himself to the flock to the point that the birds are utterly comfortable with him as a part of their world. Some stand on his head and shoulders. They perch on his arms. Some pluck seeds gently from between his lips.
Bittner, we find out, is something of a “wild” person. His life has no path. But, unbeknownst to him, these parrots have provided him with direction, indeed everything he needs in life.
A kindly resident of the hill allows Bittner to live rent-free in an old cottage on their property and the notoriety of the situation has brought him into contact with the local civic and scientific community.
Bittner actually began studying the parrots when someone gave him a pencil and a notebook. Eventually he became a rare expert on a type of bird that is extremely hard to study in its natural environs in South America. He names the birds and watches their mating and fledging patterns while his relationships with different individuals wax and wane over the years.
The film is an absolute charmer. Beguiling in its simplicity, it understates its case about human nature and about urban wildness, both human and avian.
