08/18/2026
Sharing an Interesting read about feral budgerigars. Who knew there had been established colonies of budgies this large outside of their native Australia?
Florida once had nearly 7,000 wild Australian budgerigars screaming through the palm trees along the Gulf Coast. After a 35-year collapse, the last two surviving colonies disappeared within nine days of each other in April 2014. The only large breeding population of this species outside of Australia is gone, and the final act involved a homeowner removing the nest boxes from a suburban yard that the last colony depended on for survival.
Budgerigars are the most popular cage bird in the world. They are small, loud, green-and-yellow parrots native to the arid interior of Australia, where they travel in nomadic flocks that can number in the tens of thousands. Starting in the 1950s, escaped and released pet budgerigars began appearing along Florida's central Gulf Coast between St. Petersburg and Hernando County. The climate was warm enough. The suburban landscape provided food from bird feeders and flowering plants. The birds found cavity nest sites in boat davits, drainage pipes, and backyard nest boxes, and they started breeding.
The population exploded. By the mid-1970s, flocks of wild budgerigars were a daily sight across the Gulf Coast suburbs north of Tampa Bay. One roost at Holiday was estimated at 6,000 to 8,000 birds. The 1977-78 Christmas Bird Count recorded 6,895 individuals across the survey circles. Some estimates placed the total population above 20,000. An Australian desert parrot had established itself in suburban Florida and was thriving in a landscape it had never evolved to occupy.
Then the house sparrows came for the nest holes.
House sparrows are cavity nesters. They are also aggressive, adaptable, and willing to evict other species from cavities by destroying eggs, killing nestlings, and physically occupying the hole until the original tenant gives up. When house sparrow numbers increased across the Florida Gulf Coast during the 1980s, they began taking over the same cavities budgerigars depended on for nesting. The budgerigars could not compete. A house sparrow that enters a budgerigar nest will kill the occupant or drive it out. The budgerigar has no counter. It evolved in Australian desert hollows where house sparrows do not exist.
By the 1987-88 Christmas Bird Count, the population had crashed to 385. A 94 percent decline in ten years. By the mid-1990s, the entire Florida budgerigar population had contracted to two tiny colonies: one at Hudson in Pasco County and one at Hernando Beach in Hernando County. Each held fewer than 100 birds. Birders drove from across the state and sometimes across the country to see them. Some spent hours crawling the residential streets of Hernando Beach at five miles per hour and saw nothing.
The Hernando Beach colony had become dependent on a single suburban property. A yard on Gulfview Drive contained roughly 40 nest boxes that the homeowner had installed or maintained. The budgerigars nested in them because house sparrows had taken everything else. The boxes were the colony's entire reproductive infrastructure. In 2012, the property changed ownership. The new owner removed the nest boxes. The flock that had been using them lost its breeding sites in one afternoon.
Bill Pranty, the Florida ornithologist who had documented the entire rise and fall of the budgerigar across three decades of field work, recorded the end. In April 2014, the final budgerigars at Hudson and Hernando Beach died out within days of each other. Pranty published the extirpation in 2015 and noted the coincidence of the timing without being able to explain it. Two colonies 15 miles apart, each numbering in the single digits, both vanishing in the same week of April as if the species had decided collectively that the experiment was over.
Source: Pranty (2001), North American Birds / Pranty (2015), Birding / USF Florida Breeding Bird Atlas II / BirdForum / The Birdchaser.
