The subtitle of Judy Irving’s tender and soulful 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Kino, Blu-ray, $23.96) could be In Defense of Anthropomorphism. And it’s a pretty darn effective one.
Mark Bittner, the doc’s subject, doesn’t see himself as an eccentric for the hobby that became his passion: feeding and caring for the countless feral parrots — nonnative species whose origins in the U.S. are much-debated — that congregated in and around his cottage in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. At the film’s outset, many will be skeptical of his denial of eccentricity.
A self-professed spiritual seeker, Bittner moved from Seattle to North Beach to chase his dream of becoming a professional musician. When that didn’t work out, he followed the itinerant philosophy of Beat influences like Jack Kerouac, who had contributed mightily toward northern California’s freewheeling mythos.
With his long ponytailed hair and scruffy beard, Bittner looks the part of a member of the Grateful Dead’s road crew, but it’s his communion with the birds, not his appearance or lifestyle, that most cemented his oddness to the normies, many of whom visited Bittner as a tourist attraction. In addition to hand-feeding the flock of mostly cherry-headed conures that have taken refuge in the trees outside his home, he outfitted his residence with cages — not just for wounded birds but for birds that simply prefer being indoors.
One such bird, tellingly named Mingus, is reportedly as mercurial as his namesake musician. A “Jekyll and Hyde” personality, Mingus loves bobbing his crest in rhythm to Bittner’s acoustic folk songs, but when he’s in a foul mood, he can easily bite the hand the feeds him. His punishment? Enduring the dreaded outside for a few minutes with his fellow conures.
Bittner has given all of the birds names, and he explains the various physical markers and behaviors that identify them. Scrapper once plucked its own feathers from anxiety, with a barren underside to prove it. Picasso and Sophie have become monogamous lovers, despite or because of the nerve damage they share. Bittner seems to reserve his deepest affection for Connor, his lone blue-crowned conure, isolated from the cherry-headed flock, eternally screeching into the void for a potential mate. As a single man in his own precarious living situation, Bittner’s musings on Connor sound like self-diagnoses: “He tolerates everyone around him, but he doesn’t really have anybody that he loves.” How much of the birds’ backstories are merely Bittner’s own projections?
Irving, a filmmaker whose work mostly focuses on nature, the environment and our place within it, found in Bittner a gold mine for any nonfiction storyteller. Beyond the surface eccentricity, Bittner simply gives good copy — he’s an open book regarding his past as a homeless vagabond working odd jobs, his desire to find a way of living that’s unshackled from the capitalist paradigm, and his inexhaustible knowledge of his parrots and the contradiction at the heart of their day-to-day life — wild by nature, domesticated by circumstance. (Bittner would later disavow the hand-feeding on display throughout The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, even persuading the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance against it.)
An accomplished documentarian with an ear for organic humor and the ability to summarize a biography in visual shorthand, Irving is most successful at crafting a subtle emotional arc over her compact 83-minute love letter to Bittner (the two became a couple, like Picasso and Sophie, during the making of the movie), the parrots and their shared city.
As something of a birder myself who, like many, deepened my appreciation of our avian friends during COVID, I’m an easy sell for Bittner’s unorthodox relationship with his squawking charges. But even for viewers not readily inclined to view the parrots through Bittner’s humanist lens, Irving is likely to inspire a reassessment of animal consciousness by the film’s poignant conclusion.
By the gripping emotional climax of The Wild Parrots, the quirkiness that defined our introduction to Bittner and his menagerie has evolved into a profound reflection on our psychic and spiritual bond with beings that, let’s just say, are lower on the food chain. Detractors may deem it woo-woo hokum, but Bittner’s remembrance of a parrot that sought his succor in its dying hours will wet the eyes of the compassionate majority. Parrots, as they say, are just like us.