In the blink of an eye, spring has arrived in Oxford and seems here to stay! I’m entering the last couple weeks of my program, and to be honest, it feels like vacation already. I most definitely still have work to do, but I’ve been trying to make the most of my remaining time here by exploring new places and enjoying the ones I find myself returning to. I spent this morning working in a cafe I had never been to—the delightful Paper Boat Cafe, which was located right on the Thames—and then went for a walk in Christ Church Meadow after lunch. I had never walked all the way around the meadow before, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how lovely the walk was. I walked past small bends in the River Cherwell where punters were enjoying the sunny day and watched mallard ducks waddle across the walking path. I found a bench in a shaded section of the walk and closed my eyes to notice the sounds in this spot. I could hear the wind blowing and the daffodils, grasses, and leaves in the meadow rustling in the breeze. I heard many bird calls, near and far, although I couldn’t tell where most of them were coming from. I could hear the loud, insistent call of the bright green parakeets very distinctly, as well as the quacking ducks and dogs passing by. 

Punters on the Cherwell

I had never seen a parakeet before, and I certainly didn’t expect to find them perched in the trees of Oxford, but I discovered through some searching on the internet that they are a living example of Britain’s colonial legacy. Though there are many myths around how parakeets—which are apparently now a common sight in London’s many parks and cemeteries—first arrived in England, they were actually originally brought from India as exotic pets. Around 26,000 birds were imported between the 1970s and 2007, when importing parakeets became banned, although they’ve been spotted in England as early as the 1930s. The colonial history between Britain and India shapes the landscape of this spot through the presence of the parakeets, which have been labelled as ‘exotic’ and taken from their native habitat to serve as decoration in England. This very much mirrors colonial practices of botany that I learned about in my Environmental Studies seminar last fall, in which ‘exotic’ plants would be extracted as part of Western colonial conquest and placed on display as ornamental plants in greenhouses and herbariums across Europe. The role of the UK as a colonizer has greatly shaped the landscape and ecosystems around me. Green spaces here, like Christ Church Meadow, are available, but not as accessible as I would like them to be. I wrote in my first entry about the barriers to access for people who want to be in nature, and I’ve still found this to be true after being here for eleven weeks.

Very blurry picture of a parakeet I saw!