Yoshinori Mizutani's incredible photographs of Tokyo’s parrot infestation

When Yoshinori Mizutani first moved to Tokyo and saw huge hordes of lime green parrots jetting through the city’s sky, he says that he was scared and felt like he’d fallen into a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. Getting over the initial shock, Yoshinori began to photograph the surreal spectacle, and he discovered that the birds were originally brought from the tropics to Japan as pets in the 1970s.

Now they’ve infested Tokyo’s telephone wires and nested in trees made of leaves the same colour as their feathers, and Yoshinori’s bold photographs capture their strange, alien, and slightly sinister presence. Sometimes Yoshinori’s flash make the parrots look magical and eerily angelic, like the flying paper dolls in Spirited Away, and at other times they seem shadowy and alarming. One thing is for certain, it is breathtaking to see their lime bodies illuminated against the faded pink and blue hues of the Tokyo sky.