[hellinahandcart]

I have seen parrot nests on telephone poles all over Brooklyn! Someone told me they were parrots who'd escaped people's homes, met one another, and set up housekeeping :D. It seemed like an awful lot of ramdomly-escaped parrots to me, considering the number of nests (your explanation makes a lot more sense). We've had mild winters for the past three years, too, so that explains how so many survived.

But all it would take, really, is ONE sick parrot in a smuggled load. The Spanish flu epidemic started when one sick woman stepped off a boat here.

[Bon mots]

Monk Parrots are now living and breeding quite happily all over the Northeast USA, mostly along or close to shoreline areas. They are also known as Monk Parakeets. You can find them as far north as New Haven, Connecticut.

I've heard a million stories about where the colonies got started... one of them involved PT Barnum and the parrots escaping. They live in large colonies and make a lot of noise, although they are pretty to look at. I've heard they got their start in Bridgeport, Connecticut in a seaside area called "St. Mary's By the Sea".

Getting back to the main point - mosquito borne diseases... it's not hard to imagine them arriving on aircraft. Suppose a mosquito gets squashed on a windshield of a jet... the eggs inside would survive the six hour flight from Africa and possibly be washed off by the rain into a swampy area. After all, Tiger mosquitoes came over in the residual water in used tires shipped to America for re-treading.

However, if you want to pin this one on Castro and Saddam, hey, why not?