Many people do not realize that until relatively recently,
the eastern United States had a native parrot that could be found as far north
as New York and as far west as Colorado. The Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis Carolinaensis) was a small
green parrot with a bright yellow head, reddish coloring around the eyes and an
ivory bill.
Early settlers wrote about large flocks of parrots living in
old sycamore trees along meandering rivers of the Mississippi River Valley.
Others describe parakeets playing in the winter snow in upstate New York. Considering
that most parrots are tropical birds, scientist are still trying to uncover the
many mysteries of the Carolina parakeet. Many important questions have been
left unanswered following their extinction nearly 100 years ago.
To this day, the life cycle of the Carolina parakeet is
poorly understood by scientists. Some writers stated that small flocks of the
birds would share nest cavities in large sycamore trees in wetlands. Others
described large, communal nests made out of sticks similar to those created by
the monk parakeet. Still others mention parakeets breeding in the rafters of
old barns.
Other unanswered questions include how these colorful birds
survived winter temperatures below zero degrees. Some researchers believe that
they migrated to warmer climates in the fall, while others point out winter
sightings in Ohio. Their food sources are even under investigation due to their
ability to eat seeds that are poisonous to all other birds. Even the most basic
information on this bird remains unanswered.
What Happened?
I have always been interested in how this fascinating bird
disappeared, despite having such a large habitat. Extinctions can usually be
easily understood. Great auks were hunted for food until their numbers got so
low that egg collectors paid large sums of money for samples, encouraging
anyone with a boat to travel to remote islands to seek them out. The Dodo bird
was driven to extinction by feral pigs, monkeys and rats introduced to their
tiny, predator free island. These introduced species quickly targeted the slow
moving bird at each stage of its life cycle.
Only a handful of birds have been lost from the U.S. outside
of Hawaii. Most birds take precautions by nesting high in trees to avoid rats
and raccoons or feeding in large flocks to keep watchful eyes on hawks and
other predators. The Carolina parakeet shared both of these behaviors, so what
happened?
Written records shared by early settlers moving westward
often describe encountering great flocks of the birds numbering in the hundreds;
these flocks soon disappeared altogether over a period of only ten to twenty
years. This sudden collapse of the Carolina parakeet population greatly limited
the ability of scientists to study these colorful birds.
Almost every firs- person account that I’ve read seems to
follow the same timeline. Descriptions of huge flocks of Carolina parakeets when
frontier towns were first settled, followed by the gradual reduction in numbers
and finally their disappearance in under 20 years. Accounts mention specimens
being shot and young teens climbing trees to steal baby birds, but these actions
do not address the large-scale eradication of this species. Even stories of
farmers killing birds in their orchards can’t address the complete collapse in
their population, as most Carolina parakeets lived in isolated wetlands far
from the nearest village.
Over the last thirty years, scientists have concluded that something
other than human interaction must have killed off the Carolina parakeets. Most
are focusing on an unknown disease as the primary cause. This type of mass die-off
due to disease is not unknown, considering the history of the American chestnut
and the American elm.
If they were truly killed off by disease, which disease was
it? What could have killed off every parakeet over such a short period of time?
Could farm animals brought with the early settlers be the host of the disease
in question? It’s unlikely that cattle, pigs and other mammals were the host.
Maybe the host animal was another bird.
Chickens are known to be hosts to several diseases that can
kill other birds and even humans. It wouldn’t be out of the question that the
smoking gun points at them at some time in the future.
Another potential killer is the honey bee. Some writers have
speculated that bees took over the tree nests needed by the parakeet. My
concern with this idea is that honey bees are often associated with human settlements,
while the Carolina parakeets were believed to nest in sycamore trees in swamp
land (or as we call it today- wetlands). If honey bees were taking over all of
the suitable nesting cavities in trees, where was the impact to other birds,
including woodpeckers?
Perhaps future researchers will find a collected specimen
still hosting a deadly virus or non-native mite that points to their
extinction.
Will we ever again
encounter a living Carolina parakeet?
Starting at age 12, I’ve often daydreamed of opening a
newspaper and reading that a small flock of Carolina parakeets were found in a
remote corner of the Everglades. Or maybe a brilliant scientist cloned a museum
specimen. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened so far.
I still get a little ticked off remembering the night of
April 1, 2009, when a prankster posted a fake article stating that the Carolina
parakeet was rediscovered. I’ll blame it on it being 2:00am when I read the
story on the internet (an example of my obsession with extinct animals), but I
should have noticed that Carolina parakeets had ivory colored bills and the
photograph in question showed a parrot with a black bill.
Anyway, no matter how many hours I spend googling “Carolina
parakeet rediscovered” nothing of value ever turns up. However on any given
week, you’ll find an article or blog claiming that a thylacine, ivory-billed woodpecker
or passenger pigeon was photographed or videotaped, but by the end of the
article you’re always presented with a blurry photo.
Why is it that there never seems to be even the remotest hint
of a living Carolina parakeet? My belief is that each of the animals I’ve
mentioned can easily be a case of mistaken identity. A thylacine looks a lot
like a coyote with mange. An ivory-billed woodpecker looks very similar to a pileated
woodpecker. Even the passenger pigeon can be mistaken for a discolored mourning
dove. However, there are no other native parrots to be found in the eastern US.
The only parrots that are living in the wild today are feral birds found in the
suburbs eating from bird feeders. You’re not going to find a sun conure, for
example, in the middle of a swamp in Arkansas.
If we woke up tomorrow morning to a report of a living
Carolina parakeet, where would they have been found? I’m of the opinion that
the U.S. is out of the equation. However, maybe some existed in Cuba outside of
their known historic range. Perhaps deep in a swamp lives a small population of
birds that blends in with the other native parrots on the island. Very doubtful
of course, but it gives me some hope.
What about cloning?
Dolly the sheep started it all in 1996, when scientists in
Scotland announced the first cloning of a mammal. Early reports discussed how
this new technology was going to revolutionize science as we know it. Disease
resistant humans with an average IQ of 150 were right around the corner. Get
ready for mammoths and dodo birds at your local zoo. Everything was going to
change.
Twenty-one years on and still no mammoths. The number of
cloned animal species is short. The closest we’ve come to cloning an extinct
animal was using frozen DNA from a Spanish ibex subspecies to produce a clone
that lived for several hours and some gastric brooding frog eggs that divided a
handful of times before stopping.
On any given day, you can google “extinct clone” and read
about a scientist claiming that a living mammoth will be born in the next 3-5
years. But it never happens.
In my non-scientific understanding (I’m an engineer that got
a B- in biology), we’re probably decades away from bringing back the Carolina parakeet.
Cloning extinct animals still has too many barriers that need to be overcome.
Ten years from now, we may read about the insertion of sections of DNA from a
black footed ferret museum specimen into the cells of a living ferret to
enhance this species diversity. Or maybe several sections of a heath hen’s DNA
are inserted into a close relative to create a hybrid specimen that looks and
acts somewhat like an actual heath hen.
The closest relatives to Carolina parakeets are conures
living hundreds of mile away in South America. But, they’re probably more distantly
related to the Carolina parakeet than we are from Neanderthals. It’s very
unlikely that we can currently insert sections of Carolina parakeet DNA into a
sun conure to produce an almost pure Carolina parakeet. Even if we had a
complete section of DNA, they’re probably too distantly related to make it
work.
If not cloning, are
there other options?
I’ve read on several occasions that two different species of
conures were cross-breed to create a bird that looks a lot like a Carolina parakeet,
however they’ve never included a photo of the bird.
After a number of attempts, you may be able to produce an offspring
that includes the ivory colored bill and red face of the mitred conure with the
red and yellow facial patterns of the jandaya conure. By no means would this
hybrid be capable of living in the same habitat as a Carolina parakeet, but
perhaps down the road soft releases could be made in Charleston, South Carolina
as a tourist attraction similarly to the parrots of San Francisco.
Once we have this pseudo-Carolina parakeet available to
scientists, at some point they could begin to insert small sections of Carolina
parakeets DNA into them to produce parrots that behave more like the actual
bird. These new birds could then be introduced into Carolina parakeet habitat.
Photographs and video
of living Carolina parakeets
I’ve always been surprised that so few photographs of a
living Carolina parakeets exist as I’ve only been able to locate two photos. In
addition, I’ve read on multiple occasions that “someone” has a color video of a
possible flock of Carolina parakeets taken in Florida sometime between the late
1930s to early 1950s. Despite many attempts to find this video, I’ve had no
luck.
I’m really surprised that no photos have been found of the
last known Carolina parakeet (Incas) living in the Cincinnati Zoo before they
went extinct in 1918. Surely, in some drawer is a good, detailed photo of the
bird.
Below is a photograph of a pet Carolina parakeet.
I couldn’t find a free copy of the second photograph, but
it’s a poor quality photo of a bird sitting on a branch in front of a solid
background. You really have to spend a lot of time looking on Google to find
this example.
No comments:
Post a Comment