Marauding rose-ringed parakeets have done £10,000 worth of damage to the spire of 150-year-old church in Shirley.

Parishners of St John's Church have no idea how to stop the invaders pecking holes in the shingle of the wooden spire. They have considered hiring a falconer but were unsure as to whether a hawk would be enough to chase away the birds.

Bernard Day, 96, the church secretary said: "The problem is getting worse and worse and we just don't know what to do. It is no good repairing the spire if the birds are going to do more damage."

One of the church warden's Bernard Maguire, 67, said: "We had no problem until about a year ago when I noticed the holes appearing. We are concerned that the birds are breaking their way into the spire to nest. At the moment, they roost in the pine trees nearby.

"They are a real menace. They make a dickens of a noise and at this time of year strip people's fruit trees bare. We considered hiring a falconer, like at St Paul's which uses a hawk to scare the pigeons away, but are not sure a hawk would want to take on a flock of parakeets with their sharp beaks."

Rose-ringed parakeets are not native to Britain and are common to parts of Africa and Asia. No one knows how they came to start breeding in London. The most persistent theory is that a whole flock of the birds escaped from Shepperton Studios in Surrey in 1951 from the set of The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.

There have been records of the birds in Croydon since 1970 when they were spotted around the Bethlem Hospital and Lloyd Park area.

They are now particularly plentiful in west London, especially in the wooded stretch of the Thames from Kew to Hampton Court.

It is estimated by ornithologists that their population stands at about 30,000 and is expanding, heading for 50,000 by the end of the decade. The parakeets nest in tree holes but there is no evidence that they displace British tree-nesting species.

St John's is a gothic grade II listed church which was designed by Gilbert Scott, the architect for St Pancras Station. It was consecrated in 1856.