Birds are nesting on Bird Island, in the Indian River Lagoon, a few blocks and an open channel away from my home.

My seven-year-old niece was visiting with her parents and little sister and one afternoon last week we went birding.

She was into it.

She liked the binoculars and learned to use them quickly.

We could see Wood Storks with nesting material.

So many large birds perching and nesting on top of the mangove trees.

Pelicans, cormorants and egrets are there now too, with a few vultures waiting for an opportunity to dine.

Clean up crew.

Birds everywhere!

Next we went to Sandsprit Park looking for parrots but didn’t find any. We did spot a big bird “fishing”.

This Great Blue Heron was quite comfortable around a fisherman at the end of a dock.

My niece was thrilled at the bird’s size and beauty.

A Great Blue Heron is not something she sees often in her Philadelphia suburb.

“He’s so pretty!”

GBH: Largest of the North American herons with long legs, a sinuous neck, and thick, daggerlike bill. Head, chest, and wing plumes give a shaggy appearance.

Big feet!

We saw other birds in the park too, including this clever crow taking bags out of the trash and rolling them around to see if there was any food left in them.

In Manatee Pocket, a pelican caught a fish.

We drove to a neighborhood in Port Salerno near Pirate’s Cove where I had seen parrots a few times before and… bingo! Quaker Parrots, aka Monk Parakeets.

“My goal is to see parrots this vacation,” my niece had told me a couple of days before. We high-fived each other.

It may come as a surprise to see noisy, green-and-gray parrots racing through cities in the U.S. But Monk Parakeets, native to South America but long popular in the pet trade, established wild populations here in the 1960s. They are the only parrots to nest communally; dozens live together year-round in large, multifamily stick nests built in trees and on power poles.

We saw 8 or 10 flying around and they appeared to be nesting in a cabbage palm covered in viney vegetation.

Monk Parakeets are very social, spending their whole lives living in bustling colonies of dozens of individuals. Every morning they leave their nests to forage, spending the day climbing through trees (sometimes using their beaks as a climbing aid) or dropping to the ground in search of food. At dusk they all gather back at the nests to roost, both during the breeding season and after it is over.

Monk Parakeets were introduced to the U.S. in the 1960s via the release or escape of pet birds. Since then their numbers have grown and they now occur in several cities including San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Providence, Miami, and St. Petersburg. They are also numerous in their native South America. Partners in Flight estimates the global breeding population at 20 million, with 3% of these in the U.S. and none in Canada or Mexico. The species rates a 6 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score. Monk Parakeet is not on the 2014 State of the Birds Watch List. Historically, most management efforts toward Monk Parakeets, both in the U.S. and in South America, have been directed at curbing their populations because of their reputation as an agricultural pest. As it turns out, their populations have persisted but have not spread, and in the U.S. there are no longer active programs to control their numbers.

I guess we have learned to live with these noisy, pretty little green birds.