The Brief

Parrots have been waking up Southern Californians with their squawking for more than 70 years now. Assumed to have arrived here as part of the pet trade as far back as the 1950s, they're originally from Mexico, where they're endangered.

Now, they're thriving in places like Los Angeles, their numbers exploding over the past decade.

That success may not seem like a surprise to you if you've been listening to them chatter away outside your apartment, or fly en masse from one city block to another.

However, their rise has captured the interest of academics, like those at Occidental College, who took me on a parrot outing in Pasadena, and made the case that they need the public's help to truly understand the birds.

Russell Campbell and John McCormack from Occidental College pointing out parrots congregating in sycamore trees at dusk in Pasadena.

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Jacob Margolis

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A lot to learn

The team at Occidental set out to explore how and why the parrots have been thriving. It's curious because our environment is wildly different than where they come from in Mexico. It's colder here, with more development and less vegetation.

One of the reasons for their success seems to be — much like with the Swinhoe's white-eye — that over the past century, we inadvertently built an ideal environment for the parrots by importing non-native subtropical plants, kept alive with supplemental irrigation.

"We have this abundance of exotic trees that they've been able to take advantage of that none of the native species have been using. And so it was that perfect opening for them to be able to come in and thrive here," said Brenda Ramirez, staff lead of the Free Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project at Occidental College and lead author on a recent paper that looked specifically at red and lilac-crowned parrots.

They seem to love loquats, she said.

Another factor behind their rise is likely just their general ability to adapt.

"They seem to have some behavioral plasticity, in the sense that they can change their behaviors," said John McCormack, director of the Moore Lab of Zoology at Occidental. He joined us in the field alongside a colleague, Russell Campbell.

Parrots are quite smart and tolerant of a range of conditions. They're able to figure out survival in new habitats and which food sources will work for them — though, there's likely a limit to this adaptation, as they're often found in areas where the temperature doesn't usually drop below freezing like in Florida and Texas.

It also probably helps that they don't have any natural predators here.

Could we see a new parrot evolve?

Another fascinating aspect is that though different types of parrots have congregated here from various parts of Mexico, they're commingling and in some cases, are believed to be cross breeding and hybridizing — though it's not common.

"There is definitely evidence for hybridization," said McCormack.

"They look kind of halfway in between red-crowned and lilac-crowned, or they look like red-crowned with a little dash of yellow in the head, so maybe the hybridization is with yellow-headed parrots. We're just starting to get some DNA evidence where you can see it in the DNA as well."

There's a remote, theoretical possibility that we might even eventually see a unique Southern California parrot develop.

"That doesn't seem to be happening in the city right now, but you never know. Evolution's a journey and you don't know where it's gonna end up," said McCormack.

Yellow-headed parrots hanging out at dusk above a busy street in Pasadena.

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Russell Campbell

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How you can help scientists study the parrots

One of the best ways for scientists to research bird movement, behaviors and adaptations, is with regular in-field documentation, which is where you come in. Academics can pull data from eBird (Cornell University) and iNaturalist, a free app that you can download and use to both identify and take pictures of birds that you find. That's where Ramirez pulled information from for the latest study.

"The more people involved, the better," she said.

"We could potentially even draw habitat data and dietary data, because a lot of the time you'll see them eating or interacting with one another, and so there's tons of data that we can pull from these community science observations."

Burrowing parakeets fly through the sky.

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Russell Campbell

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Where to find parrots

If you'd like to go parrot spotting, Campbell recommends you head to one of the spots in the below map either right at dawn or dusk.

You can also visit eBird to find other potential roost sites near you.

When you get to your viewing spot, you're probably going to hear the parrots before you see them. And it's inevitable that when you do finally spot them, they'll all randomly fly away at once in search of another spot to sleep for the night.

Mitred parakeets sitting in a tree.

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Russell Campbell

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There are lots of different parrots to go looking for. Campbell passed along this list with recommendations for Southern Californians:

• Red-crowned parrots, lilac-crowned parrots and red-masked parakeets: Primarily in Northeast L.A.
• Yellow-headed parrot: Almost exclusively in Pasadena.
• Mitred parakeets and yellow-chevroned parakeets: Widespread across the L.A. area.
• Nanday parakeets: Malibu, Santa Monica and throughout the Santa Monica Mountains.

Red-crowned parrot in Los Angeles.

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Russell Campbell

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Bel-Air, the dramatic reimagining of the beloved ‘90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, aired its series finale this week.

Inspired by a 2019 trailer written and directed by Morgan Cooper, Bel-Air premiered on Peacock in 2022 with Cooper as showrunner and Fresh Prince star Will Smith among the executive producers. It ran for four seasons, making it the streamer’s longest-running original series, and brought several of the original sitcom’s cast members back in new guest roles (and one old one).

Carla Banks-Waddles (Good Girls, That’s So Raven) joined Bel-Air as showrunner in its second season and won an NAACP Image Award for her writing on the show.

She spoke with LAist host Julia Paskin about how the series paid homage to its source material and put the real Los Angeles more front and center than the original series was able to.

On doing The Fresh Prince justice and not letting it be a constraint

“We feel the responsibility and the weight of what this IP is for people,” Banks-Waddles says. “Because it’s this beloved show. And it was beloved to all of us [writers] too. So I think we feel the weight. We wanna honor the original, we don't want to disrespect it, but we also kind of have to pick it up and put it aside and go, ‘OK, but how do we make Bel-Air stand on its own?'”

Jabari Banks and Olly Sholotan in a scene from the final season of "Bel-Air."

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For fans of the original series, Bel-Air included plenty of nods to beloved storylines and moments (like Carlton and Will dancing to “Apache (Jump On It)” by The Sugarhill Gang, which happens in the final season).

But even for people not familiar with The Fresh Prince, Banks-Waddles says, “You can still come to [Bel-Air] and go, ‘I love this.’ So I think it's just finding that balance of feeling the responsibility but then filing it away and saying, ‘But this is its own show.’ [...] And just having fun with it and telling the stories that we wanna tell, that feel important, that feel fun, that feel meaningful.”

But figuring out how to wrap up the series also brought new pressures.

“So many times you stay with a show 'til the end, and then you're let down by a finale,” Banks-Waddles says, “and I just did feel the responsibility of fans who were skeptics in the beginning who did tune in and understand, ‘Oh, this is different. I'm gonna watch it and support it, and I like it.’ And they stayed on the ride with us. So I want this to feel like a thank-you to everybody who stuck with us.”

Ultimately, Banks-Waddles says she wanted the audience to feel like the finale was less of an ending and more of a sendoff for the characters, hence the last episode’s title, “The Next Act.”

“Even though it feels like a goodbye, I do want people to think even though I'm not gonna be with the Banks family in their next act and what they're going off to, that you're gonna feel joy and hope for all of them.”

Bringing back original cast members

Over the course of four seasons, Bel-Air brought back several original cast members of The Fresh Prince and cast them in new roles — including Tatyana Ali who played younger sister Ashley Banks, Joseph Marcell who played the Banks family butler Geoffrey, and this season, Will’s original Aunt Viv, actress Janet Hubert.

Actress Janet Hubert in a scene from the final season of "Bel-Air."

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Episodic

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Hubert left the original show amid conflict with Will Smith and was recast, but in recent years, she publicly reconciled with Smith.

The fact that Hubert was on board with taking on a role in the final season, Banks-Waddles says, “felt poetic.”

The most important part, she says, was always to make the cameos feel organic and purposeful, “not  forced or too gimmicky.”

Los Angeles plays itself

Unlike The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which filmed entirely on soundstages in front of a studio audience, Bel-Air had more freedom to film in different L.A. locations.

Set in Bel-Air (though the Banks home in the series actually was in the city of Bradbury), the show also spends a lot of time in South L.A.

Banks-Waddles says the initial thinking was that because Will is from West Philadelphia, he would feel an affinity for South L.A., where his friend Jazz lives. And it also opened up more storytelling possibilities: “Like the gentrification of South L.A. ... the [SoFi] stadium coming and just how neighborhoods are changing and how it's impacting that community.”

The state of Black TV

Asked about studios and streamers backsliding on investments in content created by and about people of color, Banks-Waddles says she has felt a marked difference today compared to four or five years ago, when it felt like more doors were opening.

Now, she says, “I know there is a feeling that those doors are narrowing and that our time has maybe passed. But I also think a part of it is just the industry and that we see it ebb and flow. We see sometimes we're hot, sometimes we're not. But I like to believe that good storytelling is here to stay, and that includes our stories.”

For the full interview with Carla Banks-Waddles, click here.

It was one of the higher-profile lawsuits against the city of L.A. over the past year.

Two brothers in their 70s said they suffered serious injuries — including fractured skulls and spines — from a speeding LAPD officer crashing into the side of their car at 55 mph.

An investigator for the police department determined the officer was at fault for driving at an unsafe speed.

The city ultimately settled in the middle of the trial this September for $18 million.

It’s one of the city’s most expensive lawsuit settlements over the past few years, at a time the city has cut services due to a fiscal crisis driven largely by sharply rising legal payouts.

An accusation in the case, however, has gone unreported. Days before settling the case, lawyers for the plaintiffs accused L.A.’s elected city attorney of an ethics breach.

As the case was about to go to trial, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto called an expert witness for the plaintiffs, “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

At the time of her Aug. 16 call, the expert witness — a neurosurgeon named Andrew Fox — was on the official witness list for the upcoming trial and had been deposed by the city’s attorneys.

According to a filing by the plaintiffs, Feldstein Soto made the call while the city owed Fox $5,000 to $6,000 in overdue deposition fees for the time the city spent questioning him before trial.

By asking for a campaign donation from a testifying expert, Glassman alleged Feldstein Soto violated a state ethics rule for attorneys, which he wrote “forbids interfering with any party’s orderly access to a witness’ testimony.”

“Through her ex parte communications and political solicitation designed to privately cultivate favor with plaintiffs’ retained expert, she attempted to compromise plaintiffs’ access to Dr. Fox’s accurate and unbiased testimony,” Glassman wrote in his Sept. 5 filing disclosing the call to the court.

“It placed Dr. Fox in an untenable bind, where any given response to her overtures invites pressure and a sense of obligation,” he added.

The city attorney’s conduct, he alleged, was “improper and corrosive to the integrity of this trial.”

Five days after Grossman’s accusations, Feldstein Soto’s office recommended the city settle. The $18 million settlement — handled by her second-in-command — was finalized before Fox was scheduled to take the witness stand in the trial.

Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request through her spokesperson, Karen Richardson.

In an emailed response to questions, Richardson said the settlement “had nothing to do with Dr. Fox” and “was a product of balancing comparative negligence with the amount and payment terms upon which the agreement was reached.”

Her campaign manager, Robb Korinke, told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call. He said Feldstein Soto did not know Fox had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

“Hydee had no awareness of his involvement in the case,” Korinke said. “He didn’t disclose that he was involved in this case, nor did he donate.”

How did he end up on the call list?

Feldstein Soto called Fox because he was a donor to other campaigns in the county, Korinke told LAist.

While Fox does not appear in searches of city and county campaign contribution databases, Korinke provided LAist with an image of a fundraiser invite for Nathan Hochman — when he was running for district attorney — that listed Fox and his wife as co-hosts. Fox did not respond to multiple phone messages for comment left with receptionists at his office.

Asked if Feldstein Soto’s campaign checked whether people she was going to ask for donations had pending matters before the city attorney’s office so they could be screened out, Korinke said he couldn’t speak to that because he’s not the fundraiser.

“Obviously, if Hydee recognizes someone she knows, she wouldn’t call them, but I don’t know what additional vetting they may have,” he said. “She has no intention of knowingly contacting anyone that would have such a conflict.”

Retired Judge Jeremy Fogel said the city attorney’s phone call would not be something the State Bar would follow up on for an ethics review if — as her campaign manager said — she did not know Fox was an expert witness in the case, and thus, it sounds like there was no intentional wrongdoing.

But, he said, it raises the question of whether she or her team should be doing conflict checks before asking for campaign money.

“It’s not a bad idea” to run checks before soliciting money, said Fogel, who was on the state and federal bench for more than three decades and now leads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley’s law school.

“When you have the resources we have now within information, you could probably find it in an electronic database. It might not be an undue burden,” Fogel said.

Nowadays, he said, software exists that helps flag potential conflicts based on comparing lists of names.

“It’s just saying you’ve got a case, here’s the witness list, and if you’re going to solicit money, you should at least run a comparison so that you’re not inadvertently soliciting somebody who's on the other team. It would certainly be a good practice,” Fogel said.

When serving as a mediation judge, Fogel said, he would do a conflict check to make sure he wasn’t handling a case where he knew one of the witnesses.

Past controversies

Brought into office by voters in late 2022, Feldstein Soto runs the largest elected city attorney’s office in the country. More than 500 attorneys work under her.

In addition to serving as the city’s top lawyer — representing the city in lawsuits and giving legal advice to city leaders — the city attorney also is in charge of prosecuting misdemeanor crimes within city boundaries.

Feldstein Soto has been the focus of past controversies.

In 2023, she picked a major campaign donor with a problematic history to lead a major homeless housing provider without noting her campaign money connection.

Months later, Feldstein Soto said the man she put in charge failed to make progress in fixing serious safety problems, failed to hire enough staff and wrongfully told 451 tenants they’d be evicted.

Feldstein Soto ultimately said she made a mistake recommending him and acknowledged not fully vetting his background.

In high-profile proceedings she observed in a homelessness lawsuit, Feldstein Soto allowed the city to incur over $3 million in outside lawyer bills without telling the city council, despite the council authorizing just $900,000 for it. That prompted public frustration from some council members.

In September, a longtime city prosecutor alleged in a sworn declaration that Feldstein Soto unlawfully demanded the dismissal of a case because the defendant was represented by a friend and maximum campaign donor. A spokesperson for Feldstein Soto has said the allegations are untrue.

Based on a 2017 Los Angeles Times article by Frank Shyong, the new movie Rosemead dramatizes a true and tragic story of a single Taiwanese American mother named Irene (Lucy Liu) who has cancer, and her teenage son, Joe (Lawrence Shou). A star student and swimmer, Joe begins to have increasing symptoms of his diagnosed schizophrenia, which intensify after the passing of his father (Orion Lee). As Joe's hallucinations, delusions and outbursts become more frequent and intense, Irene struggles to support her son while dealing with her own terminal illness. If the premise of director Eric Lin's feature debuts sounds bleak, that's because it is.

Whether in the form of teachers, social services, or cultural shame, Rosemead highlights how external actors repeatedly fail Joe — driven not by compassion, but by their own internalized fears, exposing the lengths to which institutions will go to protect themselves from those they deem dangerous. After a school shooting drill triggers Joe in an early scene, prompting hallucinations, an administrator suggests that he transfer schools. "We all have his best interests at heart here," he says with a false authenticity to an already-strained Irene.

The story of Rosemead is about a teenager with mental illness just as much as it is the Asian-American community, in a rare thematic combination that showcases the challenges facing both. Irene projects a composed public front and keeps her sorrow private, reflecting a culture in which shame often wears the mask of secrecy. At a party, other Asian-American families quietly gossip behind Irene's back, raising questions about Joe seeing a psychiatrist. Instead of standing up for Joe, Irene insists that he's attending the Family Center out of an interest in psychology, not because he needs therapy.

Meanwhile, when Joe is at school, Irene confesses to a friend who runs an herbal medicine shop that she's avoided telling her son about her cancer diagnosis because she doesn't want him to worry. She waves away her friend's urging to be honest with him, saying she's already doing all she can. Part of what makes Liu's performance as an immigrant mother feel true is that the film doesn't try to appease Western audiences with English-language dialogue. "I'll make you another tincture," her friend says in Chinese, as Liu dutifully sips a medicinal remedy from a cup — one of many nods to the divergence between cultures in the East and West. Another: their views on talk therapy, as Irene refuses to accompany Joe in his sessions, despite suggestions from his psychiatrist, Dr. Hsu (James Chen), to do so as a way to show support. Irene stubbornly claims that Joe is getting better on his own.

Dr. Hsu plays an integral role in the film, as perhaps the only character who truly sees Joe without judgment, and in turn, tries his best to tear through the family's walls. In a pivotal scene, Irene discloses to Dr. Hsu that Joe's internet search history is riddled with queries on school shootings and is worried that he might hurt someone. "Most people with schizophrenia don't engage in violence," Dr. Hsu says. "In fact it's quite rare. We have no reason to believe that Joe is any different."

Shyong's original Los Angeles Times article notes that although mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are not significant contributors to violence in America, media reports tying mental illness and violence have increased in recent years. Rosemead's strength lies in its ability to dispel such narratives, however, the film's portrayal of someone diagnosed with schizophrenia is less nuanced than the portrait it paints of Irene. Liu's understated performance empathetically captures the resilience and sense of duty often associated with Asian mothers, while steering clear of tired on-screen tropes of strict parenting in Eastern cultures. However, the story would be far stronger with a more deliberate effort to challenge one-dimensional portrayals of mental illness. The film uses a range of camera angles and shaky movements to place the viewer in Joe's mind, putting Lin's background as a cinematographer on display. When Joe bolts from the classroom in the midst of the drill, the camera clings close, moving with him as if sharing the pulse of his panic. But viewers get little insight into Joe's internal thoughts and struggles.

If you're looking for a happy ending or an inspirational arc, Rosemead might not be for you. What Rosemead offers instead, is something real — a critique on a society that doesn't know what to do with those that are outside the bounds of what is considered normative, and the compounded effects of shame and silence. What may seem to be one family's tragedy is often a collective failure, born and bred by the same agents that pretend to offer a lifeline, only to yank it away as soon as you try to take hold.
Copyright 2025 NPR

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Wayne, his partner and son sift through their storage unit in Los Angeles.

Since they lost their apartment in June, they’ve kept the belongings of their old one-bedroom unit neatly stored in a 10-by-10-foot space — bins of clothing, a refrigerator, a mattress. Their 4-year-old, A, plays with a wooden activity cube, a familiar toy he hasn’t played with in a while. (We’re using Wayne’s first name and A’s first initial only to protect their family’s privacy.)

That night, they’ll start driving east — to a new home.

“There's nothing here for us to be around. The faster we get on the road, the faster we can get to a new life that actually has some potential,” Wayne said.

Unable to find shelter resources in L.A., Wayne and his family have been living in their car. After LAist reported on Wayne’s story, he received a couple donations — enough to get a new rental out of state in the Midwest, where he had a job offer. They got the U-Haul right away.

Before they left, a case worker from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority gave them gift cards for $60 dollars worth of groceries, he said. (LAHSA reached out to LAist after the story aired.)

‘We’re willing to give up California’

Wayne’s family lost their apartment at a time when the homeless services system in L.A. County has been strained. The county is facing cuts to housing services, driven in part by a drop in federal and state funding. And earlier this year, LAHSA circulated a memo about dwindling capacity for family housing. Meanwhile, the number of people experiencing homelessness in families with children has been on the rise.

“ In L.A., it feels like we're swimming against a current,” Wayne said. He was laid off from his job last year. While Wayne grew up here and doesn’t agree with the politics of the state he’s moving to, he said he was running out of options.

“We're willing to give California up for that because the most important thing is to be housed and fed. So, it's like a bittersweet feeling of like, damn, we're gonna go to a place where we know nothing, we know no one, we have no connections,” he said.

Wayne's son, A, slept for 15 hours straight in his new home. "He just wants to take in – the stability of being inside," Wayne said.

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In his new state, he’s renting a 3-bedroom house with a yard for $1,000/month. The average cost of a one-bedroom unit is around $2,100 in L.A, and in order to afford it — workers need to make at least $40 an hour, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Having to live in his car with his 4-year-old, he said, was “soul-crushing.”

His partner, who wanted to be identified by her first initial, E., said they had even contemplated giving their son up for adoption.

“This was terrible. We feel absolutely horrible having our child out here like this,” she said. “ We got so frustrated some nights that he wouldn't sleep in the car that we would just all sit there crying. The first night, he got a pretty bad rash on him, like, all over his body. And then, not being able to wash him as often is just ... it breaks my heart.”

Settling into their new home

After packing up their things that Wednesday night, they made it to Victorville before calling it a day. Over the next week, they drove out in their U-Haul — getting winter clothes on Black Friday at a Carter’s for their son on the way. They moved into their new home last week.

A ran into every room, exploring.

“He was kind of standing there for a bit, just kind of blank stare, and then I told him, ‘It's our home,’ and he smiled,” Wayne said.

He said the exhaustion of having to live in their car has caught up with all of them — A slept for 15 hours straight on his old mattress on the floor.

They’re all still getting used to the winter weather.

“We unloaded the fridge from the truck, and I slipped literally on the ice outside, but I was telling them, ‘Welcome to the Midwest.’”

But he said they’re warm and comfortable — and are happy to have their own place. His son still is soaking it all in.

“We left to go to the store earlier today, and he didn't wanna leave. He said ‘bye-bye’ to the house and started crying. He didn't wanna leave,” Wayne said. “He just wants to be inside. I think he just wants to take in — the stability of being inside.”