Mark Bittner feeds several cherry-headed conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (Judy Irving, 2003)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 17
newplazacinema.org
pelicanmedia.org
Judy Irving begins her 2003 documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, with a shot of a skeptical passerby who has stopped to watch Mark Bittner as he cares for a flock of forty-five cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, living in the trees outside his apartment.
“They’re not really wild if you have names for them, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man claims. “You feed them out of your hands, you have names for them, and they come up to you like they’re your pets. . . . Well, whatever.” He then shrugs and walks away.
The exchange doesn’t bother Bittner at all; he gleefully answers the suspicious man’s doubts and just continues doing what he’s doing, a big smile on his face.
It’s an extremely clever way to start the film, which opens November 17 in a brand-new 4K twentieth anniversary digital restoration at New Plaza Cinema. With the question of Bittner’s relationship with the birds resolved right up front, Irving, who served as director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, is free to now follow Bittner’s odd life choice.
Born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1951, Bittner moved from Seattle to Berkeley when he was twenty and then to San Francisco with the goal of making it as a rock-and-roll musician, in search of a “real transformation.” In 1993, he became infatuated with the conures, some of whom had previously been pets and others that had been born in the wild. Over the course of several years, he devoted his life to them, giving them names, caring for them when they were ill, watching out for predatory hawks, and keeping a somewhat scientific journal of their comings and goings and their individual personalities.
As if he’s sharing the plot of a soap opera, he talks about Scrapper and Scraperella’s breakup; discusses the pairing of Picasso and Sophie; introduces us to Fanny, Gibson, Flap, Pushkin, and Olive; sings to Mingus to get him dancing; vacuums up the mess the birds make in his apartment; nurses Tupelo; and bonds deeply with Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock, an older bird who cannot find a mate or best friend. Connor is not unlike Bittner, a single man with thick glasses, a bushy beard and mustache, and a long ponytail who apparently has no close friends either.
“I don’t think of myself as an eccentric,” he says in his calm, relaxing voice.
Inspired by such Beat writers as Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Bittner is a kind of throwback, an easygoing Bohemian going with the flow, living for free without a paying job. “It wasn’t a plan; it just happened,” he says about his caring for the birds. “It was what I was doing while I was trying to figure out what that thing would be, my idea of where I was going to go in my life. But it became the thing that I’m doing. It’s magic that way.”
But that magic threatens to disappear when he is forced to leave his apartment and has to figure out what will happen to the birds.
Irving, who appears in the film, originally intended the project to be a short but ended up compiling thirty hours of 16mm footage over a few years on a shoestring budget. “When I first met him, I thought Mark was an inarticulate hippy recluse and he thought I was an ecofeminist lesbian,” she writes in a new article for Talkhouse. That changed as filming continued.
A companion piece to Bittner’s 2004 memoir of the same name (the book has the added subtitle A Love Story . . . with Wings), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a tender and touching — and colorful — look at not just one man’s dedication to conures but the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the need for people to be a part of something, like a bird in a flock. We are not built for solitude. And that comes to fruition in a sweet shocker of a finale involving Irving (Pelican Dreams, Dark Circle), who will be at New Plaza Cinema for Q&As following the 6:10 screening on November 17 and the 2:40 shows on November 18 and 19.
Meanwhile, Bittner is working on his next book, Street Song, which will be accompanied by an album featuring such originals as “Poppa John,” “The Arrow You Want,” and “You’re So Peaceful” and covers of tunes by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]