Walk east on River Road past Vitangelo's Bakery on a weekday morning and you'll hear them before you see them: a scratchy, insistent squawk coming from somewhere in the sycamore trees across the street. Look up. What you're seeing is not an escaped pet. It's a wild bird that has no business surviving a New Jersey winter, nesting a few blocks from the Hudson in a New Jersey borough that never asked for it and, decades later, still hasn't figured out what to do with it.
Everyone who has lived in Edgewater for more than a season knows about the parrots. What most people don't know, including plenty of longtime residents, is that the birds sitting on that power line are still classified by the state under the same regulatory umbrella as Gila monsters, cobras, vipers, and alligators. That single fact, buried in a New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection dealer application, is the real story here. Not "cute birds live in Edgewater." It's that a flock that has caused no documented harm in half a century is still, on paper, treated like a public safety risk.
Two stories about how they got here, and nobody can prove either one
The version most people repeat traces back to the 1970s, when a crate of monk parakeets is said to have broken open at John F. Kennedy International Airport during a shipment from South America. The birds scattered, found their way across the water into Bergen County, and liked what they found: sturdy trees, warm utility transformers, and a steady supply of grass seed from what is now Veterans Field.
There's a second version, less repeated but more specific, that came from a commenter on a Weird NJ story about the flock. She said her grandfather managed an apartment building in Edgewater and bred birds in a storage room in the early 1970s. He kept a release lever on the cages for emergencies. One day, while cleaning, he tripped it by accident. Most of the birds that escaped that afternoon didn't survive. The monk parakeets did.
No one has ever confirmed which story is true, and honestly, it doesn't matter much to the birds. What matters is that whichever version you believe, the flock has now been established in Edgewater for more than fifty years, long enough that "any of the birds living here now were born here," as local advocate Alison Evans-Fragale put it in an interview with New Jersey Monthly. These aren't recent arrivals passing through. They're a resident population with multiple generations of local roots, which is more than can be said for a lot of the humans who've moved through this stretch of the Gold Coast in the same window.
Where to actually find them
This is the part the internet keeps getting vague about. Most write-ups tell you to walk around "the shopping compounds" or "residential buildings near Edgewater" and listen for a screech. That's technically true and practically useless. The colony isn't spread evenly across town. It clusters at a small number of specific, long-established nest sites:
- Memorial Park, at the intersection of River Road and Route 5. Locals have nicknamed this stretch "Parrot Park" for years, and it's where some of the borough's oldest nests have persisted despite repeated teardowns.
- The sycamore trees across from Vitangelo's Bakery, along with a trio of ivy-covered stumps a block further toward the Edgewater ferry landing, where Route 5 merges into River Road.
- The corner of River Road and Hilliard Street, near the municipal courthouse, where a nest built directly on a telephone pole has been visible for years to anyone leaving night court.
If you're walking the waterfront on a weekend and want to actually see the colony rather than just hear it, these three points are a realistic half-mile loop, not a scavenger hunt.
Filed under the same law as alligators
Here's the part that surprises even people who've lived alongside these birds for decades. New Jersey's regulations on potentially dangerous species, the same rule that governs the private ownership of Gila monsters, coral snakes, cobras, vipers, alligators, caimans, and crocodiles, also names monk parrots (commonly called Quaker parrots) as prohibited from being kept or sold by exotic animal dealers in the state. The classification dates back to when the birds first showed up in the late 1960s and state wildlife officials, unsure what else to do, put them on a watch list meant to track a new and unfamiliar species. Fifty-plus years later, with no documented crop damage and no evidence they've displaced native birds, the classification has never been updated.
That gap between reputation and rule is exactly what's kept a small but committed group of Edgewater residents organizing for years. Evans-Fragale founded a group called Edgewater Parrots after watching PSE&G tear down nests in Memorial Park in the mid-2000s, and pushed for state legislation, a bill numbered A454 in past sessions, to formally delist the birds. That bill has been introduced and reintroduced across more than one legislative session without ever reaching a floor vote that sticks. It's less a pending change than a running argument that resurfaces every few years, which tells you something about how entrenched both sides of this debate have become.
The twice-a-year standoff nobody notices unless they're looking
The most concrete, ongoing piece of civic machinery around the parrots has nothing to do with legislation. It's a maintenance schedule. PSE&G removes parrot nests from utility poles roughly twice a year, not out of hostility toward the birds but because the nests, which can grow up to four feet long and are built with a three-chamber structure around pole transformers, pose a real fire risk when they get large enough. The birds rebuild almost immediately, which is part of why this has been a recurring story in Edgewater for more than two decades rather than a one-time cleanup.
In recent years, the utility has worked with local volunteers, including members of Evans-Fragale's group, to time removals around the parrots' breeding cycle rather than during it, and to experiment with alternate nesting platforms that keep the birds off live equipment. It's a quiet, unglamorous compromise between an infrastructure company and a bird nobody asked to move in, and it's the closest thing Edgewater has to an actual policy on its most talked-about wildlife.
"Any of the birds living here now were born here." Alison Evans-Fragale, founder of Edgewater Parrots, quoted in New Jersey Monthly
A flock with its own constituency
None of this would have staying power without the residents who've adopted the birds as an unofficial mascot. A Facebook group called Save the Wild Quaker Parrot of New Jersey had grown to more than 4,800 members as of a 2024 count, still active with photos, sightings, and the occasional call to action when a nest gets torn down at an inconvenient moment in the breeding season. Bird enthusiasts along River Road put out feeders in the coldest months, when grass seed is harder to find. The Bergen County Audubon Society has weighed in publicly too, with education chair Don Torino noting that despite the legal label, there's no real evidence the parrots have caused the ecological damage the state once feared.
What you end up with is a strange but durable arrangement: a bird the state still won't fully vouch for, a utility company that tears down and rebuilds around it on a schedule, an advocacy group that's been at this since the Bush administration, and thousands of residents who'd be genuinely upset if the flock ever disappeared. That's not a footnote to life in Edgewater. For a lot of longtime residents, it's part of what makes the walk down River Road feel like their town and nobody else's.
Next time you're near the ferry landing and hear that unmistakable screech overhead, you'll know exactly which trees to check, and exactly how strange it is that the bird making all that noise is, on paper, filed next to an alligator.
If the small, specific details of a place like Edgewater are what pull you toward it, that's usually a sign you already understand this market better than a listing photo can show. Monica Capellan works this stretch of the Gold Coast every day and is always glad to talk through what a neighborhood is really like before you commit to it. Request a free consultation or home valuation whenever you're ready.
