E-Mail This Article to a Friend For the birds Filmmaker Judy Irving documents a San Francisco legend in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill BY TAMARA WIEDER
	Wing man Mark Bittner’s life takes flight Q: When Judy Irving first approached you and said that she wanted to make a film, what was your initial reaction? A: I was fine with that. Two other people had come along wanting to make videos, and I was in favor of that, because I wanted to preserve my memories of the birds, because I figured I was leaving soon. And the first two people, nothing happened. So I was sort of skeptical, I guess, but I was happy that she wanted to do it. Q: How quickly did you feel that Judy really got it, that she wanted to tell the right story, and tell it the right way? A: Our first encounter was awkward, and then our second one was fine, and I never had any doubts about her after that. I just felt that she was sincere and level-headed. Q: What was the process of shooting the movie like for you? A: It was tedious, hard work. Every now and then there would be something extraordinary, because we’d be trying for certain shots, and some of them would be so hard to get, and then you’d get them, and it was just a thrill. Or she’d see something that I had never seen, perhaps, and she would film that, and I was always thrilled to get that on film. Q: Did you ever feel that she was just getting in the way of your daily routine? A: No, never. By the time we started the film, I had been doing it for so long, I was at the point where I wanted to move on, I wanted to end it. That’s the thing that’s always hard for other people to accept, that I was tired of it. It was hard for Judy to accept, actually. So she wasn’t really in the way; what I was doing had become the movie, so it was not like it was in my way. Q: You started spending all this time with the birds because you weren’t working, and that was because you hadn’t found a career that you were really passionate about — A: Partly, but it was also because I fell in love with them. When I first started feeding them, I looked at it as a diversion, and something that might be bad for me. I don’t think that’s the case anymore, of course, but I really did fall in love, to the point that I couldn’t stop. Q: So now have you found a career that you’re passionate about? A: I look at myself as a writer now. That’s what I actually started out long ago seeing myself as, and that’s what I always suspected I was, but for various reasons I abandoned writing. Now I’m working on a second book, which has nothing to do with the parrots. It’s about my time on the street, what got me there and what happened while I was there. Q: When you were filming the movie, did the parrots seem comfortable with the camera around? Did their personalities change? A: They were comfortable with the camera as long as I was there. I don’t think they had much of a problem for very long, because their main thing was to eat, and as long as that thing was not interfering with their eating, they were okay with it. If I was agitated about something, they would feel it, but I wasn’t agitated, so it was okay. Q: Do you think all the attention you and the birds have received over the years has ultimately been a good thing for them? A: It depends on the angle you’re looking at it from. Notoriety, it’s always a double-edged sword. I suppose there’ll be more people wanting to try to catch one. But that doesn’t concern me too much, because it’d be very hard to do: they don’t come low to the ground, they’re always high up in the trees. They don’t go to other human beings; they only went to me because I took the time to earn their trust. But the thing that always concerned me the most is various Fish and Game Departments around the United States deciding that all non-native species should be destroyed. I was worried about that more than anything. This protects them. There’s a flock in Chicago that Fish and Game in Illinois wanted to destroy, and the people in the city, including the mayor then, rallied around the parrots, so nothing happened to them. Q: It would be interesting, if anyone tried to do what you did with the parrots, to see if the birds would develop the same kind of relationship with anyone else. A: Yeah, I think they could. What it really is about is trust. They don’t love me, I don’t think. They’ll play with me affectionately, you might say, but the main thing is trust. They want that food, but they’re also worried about being eaten. So as long as they can trust somebody and they’re getting food, well then, it’s worth it to them. Q: When did you get back to feeding the parrots? A: About a year and a half after I left. I don’t feed them very often. I don’t feed them every day. I haven’t fed them in over a week. I’m never around these days. Q: On days when you aren’t there feeding them, do you feel like something’s missing? A: No. I mean, every now and then, if it’s been too long, I start feeling like, c’mon, let’s do a feeding. Sometimes they’re here and I’m busy, so I don’t feed them. It used to be the case that if they were here, I just fed them; I dropped everything. I don’t drop everything anymore. And because I don’t feed them every day, they don’t necessarily come by every day. And there are a lot of hawks in this area, and that dictates also when they come and go. Q: Have you ever had other pets? A: Not really. I mean, there was a dog in the family house; I didn’t have anything to do with it, other than to torture it occasionally. Put it in the bathtub and watch it look helpless. Q: Have you seen Hitchcock’s The Birds? A: Yes. Q: What do you think of it? A: Oh, I enjoy it just like anybody. It’s funny, I’ve really seen how people are afraid of birds because of that movie. A lot of the time when I was doing a feeding, if the birds came too close to somebody, you’d see real fear. I’ve often had people come up to me and say, "Oh yeah, one of those parrots tried to attack me once." Which is ridiculous, because they just don’t. Q: You were homeless and jobless and alone when you found the parrots. Now you’re the exact opposite of all those things. Do you think it was fate, your finding the parrots? A: I do think that. I have really elaborate reasons why I think so. I think fate is somewhat flexible. I think that everything in existence is a unified whole, so I don’t think things really happen by accident. But you are guiding your own course a lot, so you’re creating what happens to you, to a degree. But I think also that’s kind of limited; there’s sort of a fixed, general area of the universe that you’re operating in. I do think it was fate in some way. — TW

FOR MORE THAN a decade, not so long ago, Mark Bittner was living, broke and homeless, on the streets of San Francisco. Today, he’s a published author and the subject of a new documentary film. What happened to bridge the chasm between indigence and fame?

Parrots.

Wild parrots, specifically. Though there are many theories about how the flock of cherry-headed conures — native to South America — ended up living and breeding in San Francisco, no one knows for certain. All Bittner knows is that from the moment he first spotted them, in 1990, he was captivated. Unemployed and with little life direction, Bittner began feeding the flock, spending an increasing amount of time with them and gradually earning their trust over a period of more than six years.

Filmmaker Judy Irving was on hand for some of those years. In her film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Bittner’s book of the same name was published last year), she documents the relationships that developed between Bittner and the flock, and the closeness that allowed him unexpected insight into the lives and loves of dozens of wild birds.

Q: How did you first hear about Mark? Or did you hear about the parrots first?

A: I had actually seen and heard the parrots down at Aquatic Park. I swim in the bay, so I saw them flying by when I was swimming, and I thought, what the hell? I have a small parrot myself, a little cockatiel, so I was reading a parrot magazine one time quite a while ago, and Mark had an article in that magazine about feeding the birds and getting to know them and naming them. But I didn’t do anything about making a movie about him, because in the article he said he was going to have to leave [Telegraph] Hill any day now. Three years later, he was still there, and a couple of friends of mine said, "Look, you’ve got to make a film about this guy; it’s a great story." They knew I loved birds; I’ve been making environmental films for years and have always put birds in the movies. I finally did call him up and start filming in late ’98.

Q: So he was agreeable right from the start?

A: Yeah, he was. His main interest was protecting the birds, and he felt that the better known they were, the safer they would be.

Q: How did the movie take shape? Is the story we see the story you originally thought you were going to tell?

A: No, not at all. When I first contacted Mark, I was thinking about just a very short hobby film, something that would be fun for me to do, show my friends. I literally had just four rolls of film left over from another project, and I thought, well, I could shoot those rolls, and there’s probably not much story here, but this is something that I like, because I love birds, and these are really exotic, crazy critters. So that’s how it started. And then it evolved into, I thought, well, maybe I could make a children’s fable, maybe like a 20-minute short children’s film. And I actually did some shooting with kids around that idea, but it didn’t work. It was tough to have the kids and the birds do what we needed at the same time.

Q: Right — who said never work with children or animals?

A: W.C. Fields. Yeah, he was right. Anyway, then it evolved into more of a portrait documentary, as I realized that Mark could really hold the screen, and that he could hold his own as a main character, and that he had all these wonderful supporting characters in the birds.

Q: Did it take convincing to get him to be the main character?

A: No, he was always completely amenable. And the thing that I liked, too, was that he didn’t want to mess with my process at all. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the editing or shooting or anything. He was just happy to have somebody pointing the camera at the birds. His original conception was, "Make a film about the birds, don’t make a film about me. I don’t need to be in it." But I convinced him early on that that was ridiculous.

Q: Tell me about the process of shooting the movie, how long it took and what the experience was like.

A: The whole process took four and a half years to make the film. There were a lot of aspects of what you would expect from having to shoot a nature film. In other words, lots of waiting around, lots of frustration when stuff was missed. One of the hardest parts was trying to get good flying shots, because they fly really fast, and they make quick turns, and they’re kind of erratic; you never know what they’re going to do. I can’t tell you how many times I set up and waited and waited and waited and got nothing, and then as I broke down the gear and I’m in the parking lot, they’d fly over and do great stuff. But the great part was that I could film this nature film right here in the city, right in my own back yard, literally.

Q: How comfortable did the parrots get with you?

A: They got very comfortable. As long as I was standing right next to Mark when he was feeding. They got used to the camera very quickly. They were most interested in the seeds, of course. Those sunflower seeds are kind of like potato chips to parrots; they love them. They trusted that I was okay; if Mark was okay with me standing there, then they were too. And then [in] other shots I had a long lens on, so I was further away from the birds, and they didn’t even know I was shooting.

Q: Mark is still living on Telegraph Hill?

A: Mark somehow managed to get back to the Hill, and he is feeding the birds again, but not as intensely as before. He’s restricting himself to once a day, at the most, and he doesn’t always do it every day. But he still has a relationship with the flock. It’s much bigger now, there are more birds, and he doesn’t have them all named, by any means.

Q: What do you hope audiences will take away from the movie?

A: Joy. A deep feeling of the interconnectedness that we all have with the animal world, the natural world, the world that we don’t think about that much. And one way of fostering that connection is to just simply look around, even in a city. There are hawks soaring above, there are little critters crawling around in the cracks in the sidewalk. The parrots opened up the natural world of the city to [Mark], including the native birds and all the other creatures. I think that the film does that for people, too. But there are these philosophical considerations in the film and thoughts about consciousness that people also do take away.

Q: Did you ever expect that the film would get such wide release?

A: No, I didn’t really. I didn’t know for sure. I’ve been making films for a long time, and most of them have been on TV. I have had a little bit of theatrical exposure in the past, but that was a long time ago. So I didn’t have fantasies; I had hopes. But I didn’t kid myself about it. I knew that it was a good story, and I knew that I really liked the story, and all the people that looked at the rough cut and helped me figure out how to arrive at a final edit loved it. So I did have a feeling that it could appeal to a lot of people. But when I was editing it and shooting it, I didn’t want to force it to be feature-length. If it was going to be an hour, that was fine. I was accepting of whatever it was going to turn out to be. It kind of just grew organically. In the past I tried to force a film into feature-length that didn’t want to go there. Boy, I learned a huge lesson from that. You just can’t do it. It has to have the goods.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill opens at the Kendall Square Cinema, in Cambridge, on March 4. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com