• April 19, 1999
• Vol. 51
• No. 14

Friend of the Flock

Bird Lover Mark Bittner Has San Francisco's Wild Parrots Eating Out of His Hand

Three times a day, Mark Bittner feeds a flock of wild parrots—about 50 in all—that descends onto the deck of the tumbledown San Francisco cottage he calls home. He has named most of the birds (Picasso is his fave), created a Web site about them (www.wildparrots.com) and watched them become a must-see tourist attraction. The boldest of his pea-green pals, who arrived out of the blue in 1993, eat sunflower seeds from his mouth. But don't try calling Bittner "The Parrot Man." "If I had 50 birds living in my house, then I'd be a bird man," he says. "I'm not eccentric."

These days, in fact, Bittner, 47, is acting more soberly than most folks. In June, the cottage on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, where he has served as live-in caretaker since 1988, is set to be renovated by its owner; Bittner, who makes his living ($300 a year) doing odd jobs, will have to move. Local bird lovers are aflutter over the fate of the flock. But Bittner can't understand the flap. "There's enough food out there," he says. "They aren't dependent on me."

Not that it wasn't fun while it lasted. The son of a Seattle salesman, Bittner landed on Telegraph Hill after years as a street musician. When the first few parrots—members of a species called conures whom experts believe escaped after being imported from South America—started dropping by, "it was entertainment," says Bittner, who won their trust by sitting still as they ate. "But they're not pets—if I try to grab them they try to rip me to pieces."

A documentary is now being made about Bittner and the birds, and he is working on a memoir. But he is too much like his feathered friends to wind up joining some corporate pecking order. "They are free," Bittner says. "They should never be anything but."