The owner, who lives near the Visitation Valley and Little Hollywood boundary in the city's southeast corner, said the birds got out roughly two hours before the post went up on r/sanfrancisco. Conures are not subtle animals. They are, depending on the species, lime green or split into patches of orange and yellow, and they make themselves known; a pair of them clearing a telephone wire is not easy to miss. Which is either reassuring or not, depending on how far they've flown.

Visitation Valley doesn't get a lot of coverage — it sits below McLaren Park, bounded by the 101 and Geneva Avenue, a stretch of the city where the fog tends to settle and stay. The neighborhood is mostly single-family homes and small storefronts, the kind of blocks where people know their immediate neighbors and probably notice an unfamiliar bird on a fence post. That local density of attention is, in a situation like this, the whole ballgame.