When my eldest son was young, he came up to me in the kitchen and calmly asked, “Do you want to see the rarest bird that’s ever been in our yard?”

I suspected a prank, but I followed him to the front porch. Sure enough, there was a cockatiel sitting quietly on the floor. Cockatiels (Nymphicus hollandicus) are small parrots native to the dry interior of Australia and widely kept as pets in the U.S.

Shortly thereafter, the cockatiel flew up into one of our basswood trees, out of the way of the neighborhood cats. Smart bird. I checked the newspaper ads and discovered that there had been a cockatiel jailbreak—cockatiels, or “tiels,” are fast, agile flyers—and a dozen or so people were looking for their escapees. I started calling.

So began a parade of former bird owners coming by to look up in the tree and then sadly shake their heads. “Nope, not mine.”

Later in the day, a veteran cockatiel owner came by. While she didn’t own this bird, she said that we needed to catch it before nightfall, as the temperature was dropping. I gallantly offered to hold the ladder. Up she went, cooing and cajoling the bird with sweet nothings—until she got close enough.

Then WHAM. She grabbed that bird with all the subtlety of a striking falcon.

She hauled the wayward cockatiel safely down the ladder and took it home, and I suppose she kept it, because no one else responded to my calls.

In the following years, when I kept the Duluth Birding Report hotline, every summer brought reports of budgerigars and other parakeets spotted in northern Minnesota. These exotics were likely all escapees from someone’s care.

In some larger cities, including San Francisco and even northerly cities like Chicago and New York, flocks of feral parakeets have found enough heat and shelter to thrive year-round, but they are the great, hardy exception amongst tropical bird species. And even they are not that hardy. The astute reader will notice I didn’t mention any winter reports of parakeet sightings in Duluth.

There’s no way a tropical bird would survive a winter in the Northern Wilds. Unlike invaders from other parts of the world (starlings, house sparrows and rock pigeons, for example), tropical exotic birds pose little danger of becoming established in Minnesota and harming native species.

Instead, every summer, they give a few of us that special, head-scratching, “What the…?” experience.