A shopping center parking lot after sundown may seem like an unlikely setting for bird watching, but Brenda Ramirez says Temple City is a parrot paradise.

“You usually hear them before you see them,” she said with a smile.

Ramirez is a research technician at the Moore Laboratory of Zoology at Occidental College and a self-described Bird Nerd.

“Oh, yeah. From a very young age,” she admitted.  “My mom has always had pet birds and so I’ve always loved them.”

For the past few years, she’s devoted a lot of her time to studying two parrot species in particular — the red-crowned parrot and the lilac-crowned parrot. Both come from Mexico, where their numbers are dwindling.

“We were interested in studying the species because it’s so successfully established here but it’s endangered in its native range,” Ramirez explained.

The study she’s referring to is the lab’s Free Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project – or FLAPP for short

“Yeah, you gotta have a good acronym,” said John McCormack, the director and curator of the lab which houses the largest collection of Mexican bird specimens in the world.

He says although the two species they study come from different parts of Mexico; they face similar challenges.

“Because of poaching, because of habitat loss,” he said. “And what we learn about them here in Los Angeles could help their conservation, because there’s this idea that if they ever do go extinct in the wild, the ones here might be able to be a replacement population.”

But here’s the trick. While normally these two species of parrot wouldn’t meet in their homeland, in LA these birds of a feather flock together, which leads to hybridization.

“And so you would want to be sure that you’re replacing the stock with something that’s like the original species and not a hybrid from Los Angeles,” McCormack explained.

Tracking parrots is hard work he says, but luckily they have a lot of help.  Outreach and research assistant Diego Blanco grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, where squawking was part of the soundtrack of his childhood.

“I’d hear them every morning,” he laughed. “It was kind of he sound of getting ready to go to school, you know? Having my cereal in the morning. Well, there go the parrots.”

He is highly active on iNaturalist and says the online platform is where the study gets a lot of its data – from community scientists with cameras and curiosity.

“There’s a steady trickle that comes in and over time that builds up into something that we can really use for data analysis,” Blanco said.

At present, the project has over 9,000 individual observations – a success rate McCormack is happy to crow about.

“We can see what the birds are eating,” he said.  “We can see, who they’re hanging out with, other parrot species, and, we can learn an incredible amount from these thousands of photos that have poured into our FLAPP project on iNaturalist.”

He says he hopes to sequence the entire genomes of these urban parrots to better understand if they have adapted through the generations to city life.

Understanding is Ramirez’ goal as well. “Our ultimate hope is to really get information out to these communities about how these parents got here, how they’re doing,” she said, “especially because they’re endangered.”

She says while parrots aren’t migratory, they move within a certain radius and have areas where they congregate in the San Gabriel Valley, the San Fernando Valley as well as a pocket in San Diego even other states.

If they are in a community, chances are, you already know they’re there.

“You know, they love to just yell,” Ramirez laughed. “They’re a huge part of the communities that they’re a part of, whereas others don’t super love being woken up at 6 a.m. by squawking, but I think they’re warming up to them.”

If you come across a population perching in a tree near you, she says don’t feed them or touch their nests. They are thriving just fine on their own.

Instead, parrot what the scientists do: snap a picture but keep your distance and you might help keep the species from landing in extinction.