Lifestyles

Of a Feather: Carolina on my mind

Illustration by John James Audobon via National Gallery
Old natural history books can be melancholy reading. The authors are inevitably focused on either the state of nature in their own time or perhaps in the past. Precious few natural history books are about the future. The natural world, however, is nothing if not subject to change. So, just as reading 19th-century novels can remind you of technologies that are no longer prevalent, 19th-century natural histories remind you of species no longer prevalent.

Frank M. Chapman’s “Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America” was published by D. Appleton and Company in 1895. Chapman was a mere assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History at the time. He would eventually become an august Curator of Birds. His handbook, published 30 years before Roger Tor Peterson’s “Field Guide to Birds,” is a charming tour through species of the eastern half of the continent. His descriptions are briefer than those of Arthur Cleveland Bent but far longer than Peterson’s. But he is every bit as charming as either of them.

There is a family nestled in between the owls and the cuckoos that North American bird books no longer need to bother with: the Psittacidae, better known as the parrots. For some reason the National Geographic Society saw fit to include the thick-billed parrot in their “Water, Prey and Game Birds of North America” (1965) because a few “may wander into Arizona and New Mexico” from northern Mexico. The green parakeet is also known to wander into Texas. But generally modern books about North American birds touch on this family only to deal with exotics, like the monk parakeet.

Chapman, however, treats the Carolina parakeet as a living member of the American panoply of avian diversity. His citation of its distribution is sad: “Formerly eastern United States north to Maryland, the Great Lakes, and Iowa; west to Colorado, the Indian Territory [now Oklahoma], and eastern Texas; now restricted to a few localities in the wilder parts of Indian Territory and Florida.”

It is marvelous to think of encountering parrots in Maryland and Iowa. Other descriptions of its range claim it as far north as southern New England and New York. Early explorers of the West were said to have seen it north to the 43rd parallel (northern border of Nebraska) and south to the 26th parallel (roughly Fort Lauderdale).

Conuropsis carolinensis is a member of an extinct genus that was part of the parrot tribe Arini, which includes the macaws and New World parakeets, together referred to as conures by afiçionados. (The birds sold as parakeets in pet stores are budgerigars from Australia, part of an unrelated Old World group also called parakeets.) The closest living relative of the North American species is the sun parakeet (Atringa solstitialis) of northeastern South America.

Carolina parakeets were described by Chapman: “Head and neck all around yellow; forehead and cheeks deep orange; bend of the wing and tibiae orange; rest of the plumage bright green; the inner vanes of the wing-feathers fuscous [dark]; the under surface of the tail yellowish.” In other words, a beautiful bird. The sun parakeet is similar, but the yellow and orange extend down onto the chest and belly as well as onto the back.

Why did our only parrot go extinct? Chapman lists four reasons. First, it was destructive to fruit orchards and shot. Second, it was trapped and bagged by bird-catchers and sold as a cage bird because it was pretty. Third, it was killed to put its feathers in the service of fashion. And fourth, it was shot for fun.

Chapman does not mention loss of habitat, but it was reportedly a bird of old-growth bottomland forests. As early as 1832, John James Audubon was lamenting the decline of the Carolina parakeet as the eastern forests were cleared for agriculture. Studies of the DNA of some of the last survivors (collected from their museum skins) shows that the population collapsed very quickly rather than declining slowly over time.

As their ecology confined them to just a few remaining localities, the parakeets might have been more susceptible to disease. Large flocks full of juvenile birds were seen in the wild as late as 1896, but by 1904 they had disappeared from the landscape.

Chapman went looking for them in 1889 and found them in Micco, Florida, just north of Vero Beach. He and his party found about 50 birds, generally encountered in groups of six to 20. As was the habit of these Victorian ornithologists, he shot several of them. “One of the three birds which fell at our fire was but slightly wounded, a single shot passing through the elbow, and his loud outcries soon recalled his companions—a habit which has cost thousands of them their lives ….”

The forests of eastern North America have much recovered since the turn of the 20th century and no one wears bird feathers anymore. There is talk of “de-extincting” the Carolina parakeet by inserting DNA sequences documented in preserved specimens into the very similar DNA of sun parakeets in order to make them produce Carolina parakeet offspring.

Kevin Burgio, Colin Carlson, and Morgan Tingley, writing in the journal “Ecology and Evolution” in 2017 (“Lazarus ecology”) used extensive records of C. carolinensis and sophisticated statistics to more accurately reconstruct its distribution and ecology. They discovered that the species was divided into a western and northern migratory subspecies and a southeastern non-migratory one, each having different ecologies. Their reconstructions argue for a much smaller range than has been claimed and with quite strict habitat preferences, which may be one reason why they went extinct so quickly.

This new detailed understanding, however, might help bring the species back. Burgio and his co-authors write, “the best possible knowledge of the inhabited environment, realized niche, and autecology of any candidate species will be required to successfully reintroduce populations into the wild.”

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now lives and works in the town of Wilmot. Contact him at [email protected].

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