Rumbustious neighbours

The windows of my lofty Barton Hall bedroom open amongst the tree tops that are home to these incredibly noisy feral parakeets - and when several of them screeching and dancing between the branches woke me on this beautiful autumnal and gloriously sunny morning, I decided to shoot them ..... for today's Blip :)

These parakeets are, of course, not native to Istanbul and stories abound as to how and when they arrived. Today there are several flocks of them roosting in some of the greener parts of Istanbul, of which the 65 acres of woodland that is school campus, is one. Apparently, there are over 30,000 of these 'gregarious and social' wild parakeets in the UK too - this charming 9 minute BBC video tells their story.