Many of the readers who visit 10,000 Birds are members of the developed world (more than 50% are North American according to our stats), and it’s fairly easy and comforting when we think of endangered parrots to think ‘third world’ - that supposedly ‘third world’ issues like habitat change and rapidly increasing human populations etc are behind many of the problems afflicting the world’s parrots (remember that almost a third of all parrot species are threatened with extinction). It’s simply not true of course. Parrots are disappearing in so-called ‘first world’ countries like Australia (eg the Orange-bellied Parrot) and New Zealand (eg the Kea and Kakapo) for the same reasons, and it’s not so long ago that a now extinct parrot was common in the United States.

Officially declared extinct seventy years ago this year, the Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolensis was hunted in vast numbers by farmers and sportsmen, and though no-one knows for sure what finally finished off this lovely bird it is true to say that until Europeans arrived on America’s shores the idea that the Carolina Parakeet might one day be lost forever would not have even occurred to the peoples who lived within its range…

The Carolina Parakeet

Most birders in North America will probably be familiar with the rapid and shameful decline of what was probably the world’s most abundant landbird, the Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius (if you’d like a quick re-cap of how habitat destruction and uncontrolled hunting wiped out the Passenger Pigeon have a look at In Memory of Martha). How does that sorry tale fit into our ‘parrot month’ though? It fits because at the same time that the Passenger Pigeon was being shot into the history books, mainland North America was also losing its only native parrot - the lovely, yellow-headed Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolensis.

Up until the early part of the nineteenth-century the Carolina Parakeet was a locally abundant resident of mature sycamore-dominated bottomlands and bald cypress swamps of the southeastern and midwestern states. Two forms existed, divided by the Appalachian Mountains and differing slightly in plumage. Like nearly all parrots they nested in social colonies and used tree cavities, but there seems to be little information on their exact nesting habits. In fact considering that they were once commonly found in large flocks (sometimes containing three or four hundred birds), ranged over a vast area, and weren’t all that difficult to see (they apparently kept up a noisy chatter when feeding and gave a loud, screeching “qui…qui.qui..qui——–ih” in flight which was audible from some distance) very little seems to be known about them at all.

What is known is that massive deforestation throughout most of their range robbed them of food and nesting sites (which seriously impacted the Passenger Pigeon at the same time of course); their colourful feathers meant their bodies were in demand by milliners for decorating hats; they were kept widely as ‘pets’ by people without the knowledge, skill, or interest in breeding them (which might have at least meant that when numbers in the wild dropped there would have been a reservoir of birds in private collections); and crucially - and again much like the Passenger Pigeon - farmers and orchard owners detested them because they ate grain and ripped unripened fruits from fruit trees.

No one is totally sure what finally finished off the Carolina Parakeet (competition for nesting cavities with introduced honeybees has been suggested as one factor by the biologist Daniel McKinley who wrote extensively on the Carolina Parakeet between 1959 and 1985, and a viral epidemic picked up from poultry may have scorched through the last remaining birds) but undoubtedly huge numbers of Carolina Parakeets were shot by farmers and ‘planters’. Relatively approachable and usually found in flocks it was not difficult to kill large numbers very quickly. It didn’t help the long-term future of the Carolina Parakeet too that - as John James Audubon points out in the quotation below - the parrots would repeatedly circle and hover over injured members of their flock making them even easier targets:

Do not imagine, reader, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters. So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge.

The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration. (From http://www.audubon.org)

“…until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition…”. Quite a statement.

Within a hundred years of ‘western civilisation’ charging headlong into the Carolina Parakeet it was in serious decline. In 1831 Audubon reported that “…I should think that along the Mississippi there are not now half the number that existed fifteen years ago“. The species was rarely reported outside its Florida stronghold after 1860, where - disgracefully - ’sportsmen’ followed it once it became rare enough to be of interest to them. The last confirmed sighting of wild Carolina Parakeets was of two flocks and a total of thirteen birds seen in April 1904 by Frank Chapman (a highly-regarded ornithologist and the man who began the Christmas Bird Counts in the US) on the northeastern side of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee.

But even Frank Chapman had been unable to resist the “sporting” urge in the past when it came to the little yellow-headed parrot, and a depressing excerpt from an article in the LA Times relates the following story:

Chapman was a pioneering ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, and he devised the bird count as a way of sublimating the hunting urge and replacing it with the conservation urge, the counting urge—in short, the bird-watching urge. But Chapman was also a hunter, and he tells a story in his memoir about a shooting trip he made in Florida in 1897, when there were hardly any Carolina Parakeets left. Chapman learned about a small flock and, unable to resist gathering rare specimens, shot them. Looking at the bodies laid out before him, he vowed to shoot no more of the birds. But later that day, he stumbled on another small cluster and killed them too. “Good resolutions,” he wrote, “like many other things, are much easier to plan than to practice.”

Ironies abound in most tales of extinctions, and the final chapter of the Carolina Parakeet contains one more thick slice that you have to hope was planned to highlight ultimate loss (but I suspect wasn’t): the last Carolina Parakeet in captivity, a male called ‘Incas’, died in 1918 in the same aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo that Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, had died four years earlier.

A few sightings of mainland North America’s only endemic parrot species were claimed well into the 1930s, but these were not accepted as Carolina Parakeets by most respected ornithologists of the day (sightings were considered either to be feral parakeets of a different species or mis-identified Mourning Doves), and the lovely, beautifully-evolved Carolina Parakeet was finally and officially declared extinct by the American Ornithologist’s Union in 1939.

Carolina Parakeet, mounted specimen, Museum Wiesbaden, Deutschland, Germany. Date 2005. Author Fritz Geller-Grimm (photo available from Wikimedia)

According to all the online sources I can find there are about 720 skins and 16 skeletons of Carolina Parakeets housed in museums around the world. Of the 49 supposed egg specimens Daniel McKinley accepted 20 as certainly and 7 as probably correctly assigned to this species. 5 eggs controversially attributed to this species that were collected in Florida on April 30, 1927 (FSM 87234 - 3 eggs - and 89434 - 2 eggs) are not accepted as valid by McKinley based on their small size and early date of collection, but molecular analysis could possibly determine whether these are in fact eggs of Carolina Parakeets.

So a few skins, a few skeletons, and a few eggs, are all that remains of a once very common, very beautiful parrot. Will the Carolina Parakeet be the last species of parrot to become extinct? With at least 30 percent of the 140 parrot species found in the Western Hemisphere alone now threatened with extinction that doesn’t seem very likely…

For more information:

‘The Carolina Parakeet: Glimpses of a Vanished Bird’, Noel F. R. Snyder, Princeton University Press, 2004, 153 pages, hardcover.

http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/JFO/v048n01/p0025-p0037.pdf - “Eggs of the Carolina Parakeet: a preliminary review”, Daniel McKinley

www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2004-11-08-parakeet-dna_x.htm