Parrots Orchestrate Brutal Revenge on Small Town After Deforestation Drove Them Out of Their Homes

It's like "The Birds," but for climate change.

Ruffling Feathers

An army of guerillas has emerged from the jungle and launched an incursion into the unsuspecting Argentinian town of Hilario Ascasubi.

Displaced from their homes, they're nature's embittered ronins, garbed in their red, green, and yellow liveries of war: parrots. And they're out for revenge.

The birds, like the ones straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1963 horror film, have descended on the town in the tens of thousands, terrorizing residents and disrupting local life, Reuters reports.

Hundreds of the proud avians straddle power lines and pylons, biting wires and causing outages. Others flock to the sky like they're executing some aerial raid.

They come with nothing to lose and nowhere else to go, because their natural habitats have been destroyed by deforestation.

"The hillsides are disappearing, and this is causing them to come closer to the cities to find food, shelter and water," biologist Daiana Lera told Reuters.

Bird's Eye View

The small town is hopelessly outmatched against the parrots, who bring vastly superior bird power. According to Reuters, locals say there's ten of them for every human, in a town of 5,000.

And of course, they've brought materiel. The exotic birds indiscriminately strike ground targets with barrages of poo everywhere.

Beyond that, their occupation has been most strongly characterized by their nonstop screeching. To make matters worse, the birds have even taken to disrupting enemy communications.

"They bite and damage the cables. Water can then get into the wires when it rains and transmission is cut off. These parrots create daily costs and problems for us," Ramón Alvarez, a local journalist for Radio Taxi FM, told Reuters. "It goes without saying that when the power goes out, there is no radio."

See the Forest

The invasion started several years ago, according to Reuters, and has since mounted. In the summer, the parrots migrate south to the mountainous regions in Patagonia for the breeding season. But in the fall and winter, they hunker down in Hilario Ascasubi.

So far, none of the tactics the residents have tried to deter the invaders have worked, like blasting loud noises and using laser lights. They just keep coming back because, again, they have no homes to return to — a spectacular indictment of environmental destruction in Argentina.

The South American nation's Gran Chaco forest, for example, has been decimated by deforestation. It is one of the largest on the continent — second only to the Amazon.

According to the NASA Earth Observatory, roughly 20 percent, or 55,000 square miles, of the Gran Chaco was cut down and converted into farmland between 1985 to 2013.

"We need to start to restore our natural environments," Lera told Reuters. "But until that happens, we have to think of strategies that allow us to live together in the most harmonious way possible in our towns."

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