Carolina Parakeets, #5. Getting into the tougher stuff now.
As I’ve said, I want to use this series to talk about ways in which the Carolina Parakeet was unique. Well, there’s one aspect of this species that I think stands out particularly in the context of avian extinction.
There’s a plant called the cocklebur. Common around the world, you’ve probably met it at least once or twice, its seedpods clinging to your socks after a walk through long grass, or to a pet’s fur. (Once, this happened to an engineer, resulting in the invention of Velcro.)
To most people, the cocklebur is a mere annoyance. To farmers, however, it is a scourge. The cocklebur, you see, is highly toxic. Even an animal as large as a cow or horse may be felled if it consumes enough of the plant. Unchecked by any extant natural predator (with the exception of a few insects), careful management is required to keep pastures clear and livestock safe. Though better equipped to avoid the stuff, birds, too, are susceptible to cocklebur poisoning.
When John James Audubon created his portrait of the Carolina Parakeet, he chose to depict the birds among the bristling branches of a cocklebur plant—what better place to pose the parrots, than nestled within the arms of one of their favorite food sources, nibbling happily on its barbed seeds.
Audubon, along with early naturalist Mark Catesby who wrote the first scientific description of the parakeet, noted also that the flesh of the birds seemed to be fatally poisonous to cats, which would quickly die after having killed and eaten a parakeet.
It’s impossible to fully calculate the toll that our domestic felines have taken on the world’s birds. Invasive on every continent to which we’ve carried them, it’s estimated that cats kill a minimum of 2 billion birds per year just in North America. These losses appear again and again in the narratives of extinction, with cats factoring into the disappearance of at least 75 species of bird in the last 300 years.
The Carolina Parakeet was not one of them.
The title of this painting is ‘The Poison of the Cocklebur’. It is gouache on 18x24 watercolor paper.
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