Watch parakeets playing in the spring sunshine in Sunderland park
As the temperatures warm up slightly, humans aren’t the only ones enjoying the sunshine.
This pair of parakeets - who’d snuck away from the flock for some private time - were spotted playing in Barnes Park this week.
There’s long been a colony of parakeets in Backhouse Park, but there seems to be an increase of sightings of them in other areas of the city in recent years.
With their bright green colour, and a flock species, these ring-necked parakeets are easy to spot and are the UK's only naturalised parrot and the most northerly breeding parrot in the world.
Originally from Africa and southern Asia , they were often kept as pets in UK but many made a plucky escape into the wild and now call gardens and parklands home.
Urban myth even has it that Jimi Hendrix released a pair of parakeets, named Adam and Eve, on Carnaby Street near the end of the 1960s.
Gill Pipes, centre manager at Washington Wetland Centre, said: “Over the years, there’s become a lot of established pockets of parakeets across the UK - but we’ve actually only seen one at the wetlands centre in 10 years.
“They are much more common at our London site, where there’s a huge population. They are definitely successfully breeding across the UK and because they’re a flock species, it makes them easy to spot - they’re also quite noisy!”
After we posted this video on our Facebook page, readers said they had spotted the species around the city at locations including Hall Farm, Ryhope, Silksworth and Red House.