Carolina parakeet

The Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) or Carolina conure is an extinct species of small green neotropical parrot with a bright yellow head, reddish orange face and pale beak native to the eastern, midwest and plains states of the United States. It was the only indigenous parrot within its range, as well as one of only two parrots native to the United States (the other being the thick-billed parrot). It was found from southern New York and Wisconsin to Kentucky, Tennessee and the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic seaboard to as far west as eastern Colorado. It lived in old-growth forests along rivers and in swamps. It was called puzzi la née ('head of yellow') or pot pot chee by the Seminole and kelinky in Chickasaw. Though formerly prevalent within its range, the bird had become rare by the middle of the 19th century. The last confirmed sighting in the wild was of the ludovicianus subspecies in 1910. The last known specimen perished in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 and the species was declared extinct in 1939. The earliest reference to these parrots was in 1583 in Florida reported by Sir George Peckham in A True Report of the Late Discoveries of the Newfound Lands of expeditions conducted by English explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert who notes that explorers in North America 'doe testifie that they have found in those countryes; ... parrots.' They were first scientifically described in English naturalist Mark Catesby's two volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands published in London in 1731 and 1743. Carolina parakeets were probably poisonous—American naturalist and painter John J. Audubon noted that cats apparently died from eating them, and they are known to have eaten the toxic seeds of cockleburs. Carolinensis is a species of the genus Conuropsis, one of numerous genera of New World long-tailed parrots in tribe Arini, which also includes the Central and South American macaws. Tribe Arini together with the Amazonian parrots and a few miscellaneous genera make up subfamily Arinae of Neotropical parrots in family Psittacidae of true parrots. The specific name Psittacus carolinensis was assigned by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae published in 1758. The species was given its own genus Conuropsis by Italian zoologist and ornithologist Tommaso Salvadori in 1891 in his Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum, volume 20. The name is derived from the Greek-ified conure ('parrot of the genus Conurus' an obsolete name of genus Aratinga) + -opsis ('likeness of') and Latinized Carolina (from Carolana, an English colonial province) + -ensis (of or 'from a place'), therefore a bird 'like a conure from Carolina'. There are two recognized subspecies. The Louisiana subspecies of the Carolina parakeet, C. c. ludovicianus, was slightly different in color than the nominate subspecies, being more bluish-green and generally of a somewhat subdued coloration, and became extinct in much the same way, but at a somewhat earlier date (early 1910s). The Appalachian Mountains separated these birds from the eastern C. c. carolinensis. According to a study of mitochondrial DNA recovered from museum specimens, their closest living relatives include some of the South American Aratinga parakeets: the Nanday parakeet, the sun parakeet, and the golden-capped parakeet. The authors note the bright yellow and orange plumage and blue wing feathers found in Conuropsis carolinensis are traits shared by another species, the jandaya parakeet (A. jandaya), that was not sampled in the study but is generally thought to be closely related. Carolinensis is in a sister clade to that of Spix's macaw. The Carolina parakeet colonized North America about 5.5 million years ago. This was well before North America and South America were joined together by the formation of the Panama land bridge about 3.5 mya. Since the Carolina parakeets' more distant relations are geographically closer to its own historic range while its closest relatives are more geographically distant to it, these data are consistent with the generally accepted hypothesis that Central and North America were colonized at different times by distinct lineages of parrots – parrots that originally invaded South America from Antarctica some time after the breakup of Gondwana, where Neotropical parrots originated approximately 50 mya. The following cladogram shows the placement of the Carolina parakeet among its closest relatives, after a DNA study by Kirchman et al., 2012: