A local celebrity of a very particular kind, Mark Bittner, has passed away, 21 years after he helped put San Francisco's wild parrots on the map in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

Mark Bittner was 46 years old when filmmaker Judy Irving began filming him and his love of San Francisco's wild parrot flock in 1998. He had already spent years at that point cultivating a relationship with the 45 or so birds that spent their afternoons in the trees around Telegraph Hill. Preternaturally jobless but not homeless — he had managed to live rent-free in a sparsely decorated cottage off the Greenwich Steps for about 25 years at that point — Bittner had lots of free time to get to know the nearly identical birds and give them each names.

"There was another thing I noticed about Mark right away. He has a lot of time," says Irving said in the film’s voiceover.  "No money but all the time in the world. How does he get away with that?"

As the Chronicle notes in its obituary for Bittner, Irving and Bittner would soon become a couple, living together on Telegraph Hill starting in 2001 in a cottage in the Heslet Garden Compound. Though he still loved the birds, Bittner had given up feeding them sunflowers and being "co-dependent" at that point — Irving tells the Chronicle that when she met Bittner, "those birds were his only friends, and it was deep."

Irving's meditative, intimate film took over four years to make, whittled down from 36 hours of footage, and came out in theaters starting in 2005. It became something of a hit among documentaries, grossing $3 million, per the Chronicle — though Irving says she and Bittner did not see much of that — and becoming the highest rated program on public television in 2007.

Bittner wrote a memoir of the same name, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and reportedly has a second memoir titled Street Song, about his years as a guitar busker on the streets of SF, which Irving says she'll be seeking a publisher for.

As she tells the Chronicle, she and Bittner had 25 years together before amicably separating in 2024. And he had recently headed out on a journey to be a nomad in a camper van, making it as far as Humboldt County, only two months in, before dying of a heart attack on March 1.

Irving, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year for her documentary about the nuclear power industry Dark Circle, has now made several other films about birds. These include 2014's Pelican Dreams, a film about California brown pelicans, their struggles in the environment, and what people have learned about them.

Irving and Bittner last appeared together at a 20th anniversary screening of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill at the Roxie in early 2024.

And these days, there are more than one flock of wild parrots — specifically red-crowned conures — around the city, including one flock that resides in and around Alamo Square Park.

Below, the full-length version of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.