The Hersham Parakeets: Where They Roost and Where They Came From

On any evening near Hersham, you may notice a bright green streak crossing the sky, usually in numbers, usually loudly. Ring-necked parakeets are not native to Britain, but a colony roosts near Hersham, and it has become one of the village’s more surprising talking points.

The colony near Esher Rugby Club

The best-documented local roost is near Esher Rugby Club, on the edge of Hersham, where contemporary reporting in the mid-2000s put the colony at around 7,000 birds (The Guardian, 2006). The birds’ habit of gathering in the same trees every evening, in noisy, fast-moving flocks, makes a roost hard to miss once you know where to look. This research has found no comparable published count since then, and parakeet roosts do shift over time, so the present size of the Hersham gathering is not something the record establishes.

Where ring-necked parakeets came from

The truth is that nobody knows exactly how ring-necked parakeets established themselves in Britain, but a great deal is known about which explanations are not true. Popular legend credits everything from Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair on Carnaby Street in the 1960s, to birds escaping from the set of The African Queen at Shepperton Studios in 1951, to an aviary roof at Syon Park being smashed open by a crashing aeroplane. A detailed 2019 study led by researchers at UCL, using the same geographic profiling techniques used in criminal investigations to trace the origin of the UK’s parakeet sightings back through decades of records, searched the British Newspaper Archive for any contemporary report of these events and found none. All three popular stories appear to be exactly that: stories, repeated because they are memorable rather than because they are documented.

The one theory researchers consider genuinely plausible, though still only part of the picture, involves the Great Storm of October 1987: recorded parakeet sightings jumped sharply the following year, consistent with birds escaping damaged aviaries during the storm. Even that is unlikely to be the whole explanation. The current scientific consensus is that Britain’s feral parakeet population most likely built up gradually through repeated small-scale escapes and deliberate releases over decades, rather than any single dramatic event, colourful as the competing legends are.

When and where to see the evening roost

The most reliable time to see the birds is at dusk, when they return to roost from feeding grounds across the wider area, converging in fast, noisy flocks that are hard to mistake for anything else in the British countryside. Numbers and exact roosting behaviour shift with the seasons, and roost sites can move between years, so it is worth confirming recent local sightings with a Surrey birdwatching group before making a special journey.

The wider south east spread

The Hersham roost sits within a much broader spread of feral ring-necked parakeets across the south east of England, with major populations recorded across London and the Thames valley more widely. The mid-2000s reporting described a large roost here. No comparable recent count has been found, so its present size, and how it compares with other roosts, remain uncertain.