Carolina parakeet

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus named the bird Psittacus carolinensis in 1758. The name appeared in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. Tommaso Salvadori moved the species to a genus of its own, Conuropsis, in 1891. He did so in volume 20 of the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum. The genus name joined conure, an old term for a group of parrots, with a Greek ending that means likeness. The species name pointed at Carolina, an English colonial province.

Together the two words described a bird like a conure from Carolina. English speakers also used the names Carolina conure and Carolina parrot. Two subspecies were recognised. The eastern form lived on the Atlantic side of the Appalachian Mountains. The Louisiana form was a duller and bluer green, and it died out in the early 1910s. The mountain chain kept the two forms apart.

Evolution and relatives

Researchers read mitochondrial DNA from museum skins to find the bird's family. The work placed it beside South American parakeets of the genus Aratinga. The nearest living relatives are the sun conure, the golden-capped parakeet and the nanday parakeet. The jandaya parakeet carries the same yellow, orange and blue feathers, and is probably close as well. A whole genome, taken from a preserved bird, later sharpened the dates.

The lineage reached North America about 5.5 million years ago. That arrival came well before the Panama land bridge joined the two Americas, about 3.5 million years ago. Parrots had reached South America from Antarctica after Gondwana broke up, roughly 50 million years ago. A single fossil wing bone from Nebraska was named Conuropsis fratercula. It is about 16 million years old, and its owner was about three-quarters as big as the Carolina parakeet. Its place in the genus is not certain.

Appearance

The body was green, and the underparts were a paler green. The whole head was bright yellow. Orange feathers covered the forehead and the face, and ran back behind the eye. The shoulders were yellow, and that yellow followed the outer edge of the wing. The outer flight feathers carried yellow edges on an otherwise green wing. The thighs were green above and yellow near the foot.

Bare white skin ringed the eye, and the beak was a pale flesh colour. The legs and feet were light brown. Two toes pointed forward and two pointed back, as in every parrot. An adult measured 32 to 34 cm long and spanned 53 to 58 cm across the wings. A bird weighed about 100 g, though Animal Diversity Web gives a heavier average of 280 g. A young bird was plain green, with no yellow or orange on the head, wings or thighs.

Habitat and range

No other parrot in the world ranged as far north. Flocks lived from southern New York and Wisconsin south to the Gulf of Mexico. The range ran west into eastern Texas and eastern Colorado. All or part of at least 28 states lay inside it. The birds kept to old forest along rivers and to wooded swamps. Big hollow cypress and sycamore trees gave them roosts and nest holes.

The thickest numbers were in Florida. Early estimates put the range between 20,000 and 2.5 million square kilometres. Density estimates run from 0.5 to 2.0 birds per square kilometre. Those two figures give a total somewhere between tens of thousands and several million. Stray birds may have reached southern Ontario, where a few bones turned up at an archaeological site. People may also have carried those bones north for a ceremony.

Diet and feeding

The Carolina parakeet ate mostly seeds. Cypress, hackberry, beech, sycamore, elm, pine, maple and oak all fed the flocks. Thistles and sandspurs were taken as well. The favourite food was the cocklebur, Xanthium strumarium. Its seeds hold a poison that sickens horses, cattle and sheep. The parakeet appears to have eaten them without harm.

Flocks also ate apples, grapes and figs, often from orchards. They took flower buds, and now and then an insect. A flock could clear the fruit off one tree within minutes. The birds tore unripe fruit from the branch to reach the seeds inside. A feeding bird gripped its food in one foot and worked at it with the beak. Salt licks drew them, and they swallowed sand and salty earth.

Behaviour and social life

The Carolina parakeet lived in loud flocks and was rarely alone. Counts ran from 100 to 1000 birds, and 300 was a common figure. A flock travelled as far as 48 km from its nesting trees. The birds fed in the early morning and again at sunset. They spent the middle of the day resting, roosting or sunbathing.

They climbed through the branches with the beak as a third limb. They also walked and hopped along the boughs. Birds preened and scratched one another, which held the flock together. They bathed in water, and they lay in ant nests to let ants run through the feathers. The species probably stayed put all year, because observers saw flocks in northern states in cold winters.

One habit proved fatal. When a hunter shot a bird, the rest of the flock came back and circled the fallen one. A single gunner could then kill every bird in the flock.

Communication and senses

A flying bird screamed almost without pause. People heard a passing flock from a long way off. Roosting birds fell quiet and only murmured. A feeding flock kept up a low, steady chatter. A bird that spotted a hawk gave a shrill alarm call. The cries of an injured bird pulled its flockmates in.

Parrots see colour well, so the yellow and orange head probably carried a signal. Preening, posture and touch likely passed messages inside the flock. No recording of the voice exists, because the species died out before field recording began.

Reproduction and life cycle

Breeding ran from March to April, once a year. The nest sat in a hollow tree, often a cypress or a sycamore. A clutch held two to five round white eggs, and most accounts say two. An egg measured about 4.1 cm across. Incubation lasted 23 days. The female probably did most of the sitting.

Several females sometimes laid in the same hole. Observers reported as many as 30 birds at one nest. Both parents fed the chicks. Early writers called the adults careless feeders, and many broods failed. Chicks wore mouse-grey down until about 39 to 40 days old, when green wings and a green tail appeared. Full adult colour came at about one year, and a bird could breed at that age.

Captive birds lived 10 to 30 years. One pair stayed at the Cincinnati Zoo for more than 35 years. Nobody ever measured the life of a wild bird.

Predators and threats

Hawks probably took adults and fledglings, among them the Cooper's hawk. Raccoons, skunks, squirrels and snakes likely robbed the nests. People were the main killer. Hunters shot flocks for the feather trade and to save crops. Women's hats carried the green and yellow plumes.

Clearing of the eastern and southern forests took away the old trees. European honeybees were brought in for crop pollination, and they claimed hollow trunks. Trappers caught birds for the cage trade. The flocking habit turned one shot into many deaths. Some farmers argued that the parakeet paid its way by eating cockleburs.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the Carolina parakeet as Extinct. The range collapsed from east to west as settlers cleared the woods. John James Audubon wrote about the decline as early as 1832. After 1860 the bird was rarely reported outside Florida. The last record east of the Mississippi River, apart from Florida, came from Kentucky in 1878.

Strong flocks with young birds and breeding pairs were still noted in 1896. By 1904 almost none were left, and the speed of that end is still a puzzle. Enough nest holes remained, so felling alone does not explain it. The ornithologist Noel Snyder suggested that a poultry disease reached the last flocks. Genetic work on museum skins found no strong sign of bird viruses. The same work found no inbreeding, which suggests a fast collapse rather than a long decline.

About 720 skins and 16 skeletons sit in museums around the world. Usable DNA can still be read from them. Only 21 records of the species appear on iNaturalist, and all of them are specimens.

Relationship with humans

Sir George Peckham printed a report of parrots in Florida in 1583. Mark Catesby gave the first scientific account, with a painting. His two volumes on Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands appeared in London in 1731 and 1743. Farmers came to treat the bird as a pest of grain and fruit. Others kept parakeets as cage birds, and some birds lived for decades.

The Cincinnati Zoo bought a male called Incas, with 15 other birds, for 40 dollars in 1885. The zoo paired him with a female called Lady Jane. The two lived together for 32 years and reared nothing. The pair rolled their own eggs out of the nest. Incas died on 21 February 1918, and his skin was promised to the Smithsonian but never arrived.

In culture and myth

Native peoples of the south and east had their own names for the bird. Powhatan speakers called it Maskowhinge. Seminole speakers used pot pot chee, and also puzzi la née, which meant head of yellow. Chickasaw speakers said kelinky. John James Audubon reported that cats died after they ate the birds. Because the flocks fed on toxic cocklebur seeds, the flesh may have been poisonous.

As with the passenger pigeon, the parakeet now serves as a warning about American wildlife. The two birds died in the same zoo cage four years apart. Reports of green parrots in southern swamps carried on for years after 1918. Three parrots were filmed in the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia in 1937. Experts studied the film and judged the birds to be escaped cage parrots. Ornithologists reported a flock on the Santee River in South Carolina in 1938, and most of their colleagues doubted it.