Mark in 2024 at his home on Telegraph Hill with Parker the rescue wild parrot. Photo by Judy Irving.
By Romalyn Schmaltz
North Beach’s skies literally rang out with cherry-headed conure cries this early March as we learned about the untimely passing of one of our dearest, most influential THD members, writer and musician Mark Bittner, who passed away from a heart attack in his sleep on the night of February 28, 2026 at the age of 74 while housesitting in Arcata, CA.
Mark had embarked on what his creative partner and wife of almost 20 years, filmmaker Judy Irving, called his “nomad adventurer period.” Having been diagnosed with congestive heart failure last year, he’d become determined to “live life before you die” by bouncing among the “green velvet hills of Northern California” – as we both often called them – in San Francisco-adjacent hamlets and suburbs, entreating his thousands of blog and Facebook readers to hitch their screens to his wagon and together cheat death with a little living.
“For decades, I’ve been a pedestrian confined to San Francisco. I often get the yearning to see other places, particularly in Northern and Central California. Since my hospital stay, the yearning has become more acute. So, I finally pulled the trigger on something that’s been on my wish list for some time: I bought a camper van. A 2005 Honda Odyssey. It’s got a bed, a faucet and sink, and a solar panel on the roof which powers a refrigerator and recharges phones. I’m going to add a few other small gadgets and start taking it on the road for excursions into the unknown. I want to meet new people and see new places. I’ve always believed that one should live before one dies, and I intend to do so.”
From the road, he regaled readers with arid observations about suburban sprawl, his philosophy overriding the banality of the ‘burbs. But when he got the call to housesit in Humboldt county, he bade his followers to vicariously traipse some 300 miles up the coast with him to something much more his speed. Unfortunately, he chose to do so on Highway 1 overnight in a rainstorm. In one of his last posts, he laments, “The reason I got sick was because […] I didn’t want to abandon the scenic-route philosophy for this. So I killed myself driving up 1 all the way into the night. I should’ve taken 101.”
While in this instance Mark’s “scenic-route philosophy” undermined his future, it was his modus operandi over a long life filled with a refusal of the paths most taken.
Mark in Hydra, Greece, 1969. Photo from his Facebook page.
He had first driven down to San Francisco in the late 1960s from his childhood home and suburb of Portland, OR – Vancouver, WA – where he was born on November 29, 1951. Mark then traveled extensively in Europe, including a long stay in Hydra, Greece, where he lived among expats and local artists and musicians in actual caves on seaside bluffs, cavorting with the likes of Leonard Cohen’s muse Marianne Ihlen and seeking redemption from middle-class morality in the enlightenment of poverty and freedom from conventional expectations.
A young Mark sings his heart out on the streets in Seattle, 1972. Photo from Mark’s Facebook page.
When his beloved two-years-younger sister Beth graduated high school, he returned to Vancouver to make a nomad out of her, too.
“It was 1973, and he was going to move to San Francisco and of course I’d always wanted to go there. He’d already been there, and when we pulled up and saw the City as we were driving into it – you know that view – it’s just like opening up a world.” Besides San Francisco, “he introduced me to so many things I would never have known about otherwise, like Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce.”
“The whole thing was so exciting and new. He always called me his ‘little sister’ and watched out for me. We did do quite a lot of music in that time, singing in North Beach and Chinatown streets and bars. I was down there for like four and a half years. It was a very special time and the world was a much more wonderful place then.”
While Beth returned to Washington to “do the family thing,” Mark remained in San Francisco, hoping to support himself with busking and odd jobs. He eventually found himself in a long pattern of homelessness that spanned the 80s and 90s, sometimes housesitting for various North Beach residents, but often also sleeping outdoors in makeshift camps on Telegraph Hill’s eastern slope under our local citadel and his “favorite use of concrete ever,” Coit Tower. These decades are now chronicled in his completed memoir and studio recording to be posthumously published, Street Song.
It was in the late 1990s that Mark officially met the companions that would change everything: the wild parrot flock nesting along Telegraph Hill and the woman who introduced them to the world, Judy Irving. In 1998, Judy followed a tip that an eccentric hermit was feeding the cherry-headed conures in the Greenwich Steps gardens, and as a filmmaker especially interested in wild birds, she trucked her camera down the 100-plus stairs to where Mark was living as a caretaker.
Mark feeding the parrots in the earlier days of filming – before the symbolic haircut. Photo from Mark’s Facebook page.
Their project’s first phase – filming and getting familiar with one another – lasted over four years, around which time Judy put together a Tenancy In Common (TIC) compound of homeowners and moved onto the slope herself. Mark and Judy had fallen in love during the creative process, and Mark found a permanent home for the first time in decades. As she completed the film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Mark wrote the eponymous novel that went on to enjoy much sunshine on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Theirs was a story with the happiest of endings: they were married by Supervisor Aaron Peskin in a surprise ceremony disguised as Judy’s 60th birthday party at the South End Rowing Club in June, 2006.
Early days of Mark and Judy as a young couple at South End Rowing Club, 2003. Photo courtesy Judy Irving.
And just like that, Mark became Bittner the Bird Man. As his neighbor of 16 years who rented from one of the owners in the TIC – and who enjoyed a porch right on the path that cuts through the Valetta Heslet Gardens on the Greenwich Steps next to the house where the feedings began – I was asked by tourists every single day I lived there about the parrots and their human avatar, Mark. He didn’t necessarily enjoy this celebrity, however. By the time I moved in – also in June of 2006 – Mark had long stopped feeding the flock and even successfully lobbied the SF Board of Supervisors for an ordinance in 2007 forbidding their feeding to protect their wild instincts from urban predators.
“It’s funny, because I always had Mark down as a parrot guy before I knew him, and then when we got acquainted I realized Judy’s actually the bird lady and Mark’s a musician,” reflected Sarah Lemarié, CEO of Mickaboo Bird Rescue, a nonprofit agency dedicated to protecting, healing, and re-homing wild and domesticated birds.
Lemarié helped Mark and Judy navigate many emergency situations with injured members of the flock over many years, becoming their close friends in the process. “I think his sense of humor and musicianship were the two things I had an appreciation for the more I got to know him. I wish I’d have talked to him more about Street Song. I’ve come back to music recently for my own well-being, and I believe he was first and foremost a musician. He turned to music to make sense of the world in his early years, and it clearly was his center all through his life.”
“He was particularly jovial at the big screening of the remaster at the Roxie the first night, and he was really tickled at what Judy had done. Judy was very sneaky and she’d gotten Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s aide to create an official proclamation declaring it Sarah Lemarié Day – January 12, 2024. Mark spent the rest of the day mocking me because I didn’t even know it was my day.”
Mark in Bruce Kaplan’s studio recording Street Song’s album-length musical component. Photo from Mark’s Facebook page.
The 17-year Supervisor was himself a close friend and neighbor during all Mark’s years in the compound. “He certainly wasn’t long for social conventions like small talk. His politics were fantastic – he knew the lay of the land and could smell a ‘moderate’ BS artist from a mile away as the parrot flies. He was a quintessential North Beach character who met the world on his own wonderful terms and knew the score without pretense or animus. A pure, itinerant soul,” remembered Aaron fondly.
Mark’s antipathy for the Blue Angels (notorious terrorizers of the parrots and other wildlife) was well-documented. Photo from Mark’s Facebook page.
Another longtime North Beach neighbor and THD member, artist and award-winning tour guide Blandina Farley, recalled him as a contemporary fellow eccentric who also never left after having landed on Planet North Beach.
“Mark and I just so happened to arrive in San Francisco around the same time in the early 1970s, and it was no mistake that we wandered right into North Beach. It was an exciting, inspiring, truly magical pocket in time full of music, painters, poets, strippers, and a whole array of colorful characters – and fortunately a few affordable years before the tech rushes of the later decades”
“In those days I knew Mark enough to say hi because we were kind-of neighbors – I lived ln the Old Roma Macaroni Factory at the north base of Telegraph Hill and Mark was staying on the east side of Telegraph Hill surrounded by the beautiful garden steps where he began his now legendary relationship with the parrots. I always knew he was around because he played music on the street, and he used to stop into the Postermat where I worked on Grant. Mark was and still is the perfect independent North Beach free-spirited artist person”
“His unexpected and sad passing brought back a rush of memories of that special time in North Beach – so authentic, magical, creative and alive with passion, especially for art. Of course it still is, but we were lucky to have lived in that fantastical moment. Mark was and is the real deal, a true North Beach legend. I think of him every time I hear the unmistakable chatter of parrots overhead. And I swear they are circling above North Beach and Telegraph Hill more than ever. Like they are looking for Mark and miss him, just like we do.”
His open mind and heart were remembered by another of our neighbors and THD members, writer Richelle Slota. “Mark and Judy surprised and delighted me by coming to my Zero Birthday Party – a party I threw for myself when I transitioned as a transgender woman. I didn’t expect them to come. A Bittner sighting was always rare, but I was zero years old in my new gender and my cake had a big zero candle on it, and darned if they didn’t show up. They were as loving and giving and delightful as could be. Their acceptance meant a lot to me.”
As I lived next door to the man for 16 years, I can confirm all testimonials to his artistic, uncompromising, often hilarious character. Mark and I always tried to share tables at events like THD annual dinners and community functions, and when I became THD’s Art and Culture Committee chair in 2015, one of my first events was Walk Talks, a writers’ symposium on the peripatetic spirit featuring Gary Kamiya’s Cool Grey City of Love and Mark’s then-work-in-progress Street Song. I can’t count how many political signs we hoisted in solidarity, from enlisting the parrots in campaigns for Aaron for Supervisor and Mayor, to artfully challenging the rapacious upzoning of North Beach last year by our new real estate-favoring Supervisor and Mayor, to laughing derisively together at indifferent jocks playing pickleball in a human aquarium at the Embarcadero during last October’s No Kings march. We also had some rowdy musical jams in the gardens, and I even accompanied him to Bruce Kaplan’s South Bay recording studio for one of his Street Songs sessions.
Mark, writer Gary Kamiya, and author Romalyn Schmaltz at the Walk Talks reading at Canessa Gallery, 2015. Photo by James Cha.
Starting in 2013, Mark bonded in a unique way with James Cha, my partner who lived with me for my last eight years in the Greenwich Steps compound, over politics and humor, too, but also through Buddhist philosophy. He consoled me greatly when James himself passed away suddenly last November from a stroke, reminding me that James saw a simple key to unlocking the mysteries of life and death: they are but two sides of the same irredeemable coin.
“Mark was not afraid of death,” Judy reminds us all. “He was quite matter-of-fact about it, actually. He thought of it as part of life. He did not like testimonials or memorials. He believed in the ‘Zen Waterfall’ metaphor as described in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill:
‘There’s a story that Suzuki Roshi told. He was the Zen master at the Zen Center here in San Francisco. He went to Yosemite. And he sees this big waterfall coming over this cliff. And it’s one river at the top of the cliff, but as it falls the river breaks up into all these individual droplets. And then it hits the bottom of the cliff and it’s one river again. We’re all one river ‘till we hit this cliff. That distance between the top of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff is our life. And all the individual little droplets think they really are individual little droplets until they hit the bottom, and then they’re gone. But, you know, that droplet doesn’t lose anything. It gains. It gains the rest of the river.’”
Mark Christopher Bittner will “gain the rest of the river” this coming summer when his ashes are scattered in Trapper Creek, in an old-growth forest in southern Washington where his family had a cabin. He’ll be soon remembered in a bronze plaque to be designed and forged by legacy metalsmith Danny Macchiarini at Macchiarini Creative Design, sponsored generously by Tom Miller from the Green Cities Fund, and to be placed on a retaining wall along the Greenwich Steps at the site where the feedings all began in the ‘90s. In lieu of a memorial, The Roxie movie theater hosted a sold-out screening of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill at 3:30 PM on Sunday, April 12 featuring a Q&A with Aaron Peskin, Judy Irving, Mark’s sister Beth Lyons, and Sarah Lemarié, moderated by Amanda Bartlett from SFGate.
Mark kisses a juvenile member of the flock. Photo from Mark’s Facebook page.
