MonkParakeet_ResidentandAlien_Doughty_Robin_AustinTX_10April2002_Reel2175.wav

Robin Doughty [00:00:00] My problem is, what do I do about this rather purist attitude I have about native / non-native, you know, resident and alien?

Robin Doughty [00:00:10] This, this idea, as we have seen - look at the nutria, look at the fish species, look at birds, look at mammals - we have brought in a veritable Noah's Ark of animals and plants and organisms generally, not only into Texas, but into many, many places where European, colonial mindsets have sort of wanted to recreate temperate latitude environments, you know, whether it's Australia, New Zealand: they're all little Englands, you know, and we've brought in a lot of the plants and animals that are appropriate to those habitats, and we've not been very careful, cautious in seeing what happens to the indigenous species.

Robin Doughty [00:00:50] And now it's too late.

Robin Doughty [00:00:51] So we have these strange plant and animal communities that are new under the sun, you know, and we haven't yet learned sort of to appreciate them, or to wonder what is going on, or study them for themselves. We tend to take rather again in our research, I think, we tend to think of native or non-native. We tend to, to look at native as opposed to native or non-native.

Robin Doughty [00:01:16] And these are issues that I still am worried about. What do we do with a monk parakeet in Austin? You know, it's very successful and every baseball diamond has its stick nest and so on and so forth. Are they OK? Do we leave them alone? Do we do anything? Maybe we don't. We just say, well, it's a monk parakeet, now it's replaced the Carolina parakeet that was once here. But it happens to be from Argentina in this case.