by SARAH ROWLAND

“I wanted to get back to human beings.” And who could blame him? Mark Bittner had spent a better part of the ’90s studying a flock of exotic South American birds that had made their way to the streets of San Francisco, and filmmaker Judy Irving was there to record it. The result is the simple yet beautiful documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

“They were my friends, but there came a time when I wanted to end it and not because I was afraid that I would become anti-social,” says Bittner, a Seattle native, who originally moved to California more than 25 years ago to try his luck at being a rock star, only to end up a homeless man. “It’s just that for six years I was totally absorbed with them and what I could learn from them. So I wanted to move on, but I didn’t want to end it arbitrarily.”

He didn’t have too. When the city evicted him from the rundown shack that he had converted into a bird sanctuary, it forced Bittner to abandon his feathered friends. Normally, this is where the State Game and Fishing Agency would seize the opportunity to move in and destroy the Argentinean intruders. However, Bittner had prepared for this moment long before Irving came along. In fact, it’s basically why he agreed to participate in the film.

“I had been e-mailing this guy who was studying a flock of parrots in Chicago, and he said the best thing I could do to protect these birds was to make them famous,” he says, before adding, “but fame is always a double-edged sword.”

As we see in the film, the flip side of them being saved them from extermination was dealing with die-hard animal lovers from all over the world.

“City hall was inundated with letters, so they had called me down there to more or less to say, ‘No, you don’t need to do anything.’ Which was exactly what I wanted. Because I was afraid that if there was any kind of program, it would somehow lead to them being caged.”

Not only did the birds play a big part in getting Bittner off the streets—he wrote a book about his experience—but their endless beauty and complex personalities helped him to overcome some personal hurdles.

“At the time, I was studying a lot of Eastern philosophical traditions that I didn’t quite understand,” he says. “Though I loved reading and thinking about those philosophies, there were certain things that were just blocked. I couldn’t get a handle on them and the parrots did actually help me to understand them.”

Bittner knows all too well that it would be easy to dismiss a man who relies on birds for spiritual guidance as eccentric.

“Now I wish I hadn’t made such a point of that in the film,” he says. “But at the time, I was really marginal and it’s difficult enough surviving the streets without being labelled an eccentric. Besides, I know a lot of people who consider themselves eccentric and they recognize that I’m not one of them.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill opens at Cinéma du Parc Friday, Sept. 23

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