tell us about the Carolina parakeet :(
So, before I start this, I’m just going to say - I ADORE the Carolina Parakeet. I had the amazing opportunity to see a mounted specimen when I was 9 or 10, and it was somewhat of a religious experience. I cried. In the museum.
The Carolina Parakeet (conuropsis carolinensis) was North America’s only native parrot. They were around 10-12 inches long, and a member of the Arini tribe, which contains conures and macaws. In fact, they look very similar to a lot of conures that people are familiar with + keep as pets:
(on the left: Carolina Parakeet. On the right: Sun Conure)
Maybe that’s part of what makes their extinction so upsetting. They aren’t birds like the dodo that look like relics of a bygone era. They’re familiar; they look like a bird that would be alive today.
The Carolina Parakeet was loved by some people. Their capture for the pet trade lowered their numbers some; along with that, it seems that there weren’t many efforts made to breed them once they were in captivity, so the captive population could only go down without new captures. However, by some they were viewed as a crop pest. Carolina Parakeets foraged for fruits, seeds, and nuts, using their beaks to crack open the hulls. They could be crop pests, particularly for apple and corn crops. This led some farmers to shoot them en masse to protect their crops. It was very easy to kill large amounts of the parakeets. They traveled in large flocks, and many eyewitness accounts note that when one of the flock fell to the ground, the others would fly down, maybe to mourn.
And, slightly after both of these things had become a real problem for the parakeet, the interest in feathers in women’s fashion hats exploded. People would shoot the parakeets for their feathers on hats; sometimes entire dead parrots were mounted on the hats.
Along with these problems, logging and the introduced European honeybee taking the parakeets’ nesting sites had an impact on the population. Eventually, the parakeets could only be found in Florida. Then, they stopped showing up at all. The last wild Carolina Parakeet was shot in 1904, when a farmboy misidentified it as another species of bird and killed it for foraging in his crops. In 1918, Incas, the last captive Carolina Parakeet, passed away in the Cincinnati Zoo, in the same cage where Martha the last Passenger Pigeon had died four years earlier. His mate had died shortly before him; he was 32 years old when the species finally went extinct. Unfortunately, it is unknown where his mounted specimen ended up; there are a little over 700 Carolina Parakeet skins and 16 skeletons currently known of today, and his preserved specimen was lost.
It’s a shame we had to lose these interesting, beautiful birds out of sheer human ignorance. What’s more shameful is that we haven’t learned from our mistakes and stopped wiping species out.
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
