Parakeets

As the village where I live has no allotments, I have to travel about four miles to another village. This means that my allotment is at the foot of the North Downs. I use the plot to grow fruit and vegetables, but, as I have only had it for just over a year and it had previously been uncultivated for several years, I have yet to harvest anything substantial other than potatoes.
This morning was dry and the sun struggled to show itself on occasion, so, I took the opportunity to visit the allotment and spent a couple of hours weeding my asparagus plot amongst other tasks. Usefully employed in this way, I was quite taken aback when I heard a sound which, though familiar to me, had not been witnessed for some time. It was strange, in that this familiar sound did not at first register, it was just a strange bird call, and it was only when two ring-necked parakeets flew across the allotments that the identification finally dawned. Having previously lived in a south London suburb, I was accustomed to the screeches of these birds, indeed they regularly nested in a neighbouring garden, and each dusk it became possible to see small flocks flying over as they headed for their communal roosts.
In many ways, they are delightful birds, adding a real splash of colour to our native fauna, but there is a major downside. Not what you might expect, for I have yet to see them feeding on fruit trees, but they are tree hole nesters and the population of starlings in south London plummeted with their arrival. This fall in numbers may have been due to other factors, but there is little doubt that the parakeets could easily bully the smaller starlings out of their normal nest sites.
It will be interesting to see whether this was just a visitation, (some thirty miles south of where I usually see the parakeets), or, as is more likely, that this is the advance guard of an invasion force.