Georges has mixed feelings about the kill mission. She says it would be a "calamity" if the parakeets wiped out the nation's black parrots, but otherwise she enjoys watching them fly in to roost for the night.
"They seem to be a part of the evening routine. You finish work, you have a beer on the deck, and you see the droves of birds coming up to the trees," she said.
The ring-necked parakeet first appeared in the Seychelles in the 1970s, perhaps when a caged pet escaped or was set free, said Peter Haverson, a Briton with a novel job title: avian eradication specialist.
The population turned viable in the mid-1980s and by the 1990s it was recognized as a threat. In 2000, when Haverson guesses that the population was only a couple dozen strong, the island began an awareness campaign.
Though graceful and good-looking, the green parakeets have earned the designation of pest. They eat from residential fruit trees and commercial crops. Perhaps of greater concern to Seychelles, they could kill off the black parrots by introducing beak and feather disease.
The two species don't yet intermingle. The green parrots are only found on the country's main island, Mahe, while the black parrots live on Praslin, 25 miles to the northeast. That's likely too far to fly, but biologists fear the green parrots could hop on a ferry and land in Praslin.
The Seychelles Islands Foundation eradication project estimates the island nation now has 230 of the parakeets, but could have 3,000 in a decade if the birds are allowed to live.
The Seychelles is a chain of 115 breathtakingly beautiful islands far out in East Africa's Indian Ocean. That isolation creates unique mini ecosystems, but it can also place the black parrot in peril.
Other countries are also seeking to control their green parrot populations, Haverson said, but the Seychelles project is the first attempt to eradicate the bird from an ecosystem.
