by Pajarita » Sun Apr 22, 2018 12:32 pm
I am afraid that you are overestimating captive-bred birds survival skills... Parrots are not instinctual feeders like all precocial birds are, they are altricial and need to learn survival skills from their parents so pet birds don't have any. So unless your birds grew up with their parents eating the buds and flowers from the same park you mention, they would not know to eat them but, even if they did, they would, most likely, die of dehydration before they die of starvation and, if they got lost in the winter, they would die of exposure the very first night. And, even if they did find water and food, predators would kill them [no flock]. It takes years and a few generations of raising parrots bred from captive stock in a preserve in their natural habitat, teaching them to eat their natural diet by professionals [and aided by wild parrots living in the same territority] to be able to end up with a few pairs that make it on their own.
We all like to believe that pet parrots would make it when they get lost but unless they find a human soon after, they all die. I remember reading the story of this guy in the UK that had an African grey which he took out for walks almost every day for 25 years down the same path next to a beach. One day, out of the blue, the bird got spooked and took flight [something he had never done before]. The owner looked and looked and looked and finally, on the fourth day, he found him dead on the same beach they walked by on every walk they took - he had died of dehydration just a short walk from his own home.