Southern US: What caused the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet?
Up until the early part of the nineteenth-century the Carolina
Parakeet was a locally abundant resident of mature sycamore-dominated
bottomlands and bald cypress swamps of the southeastern and midwestern
states. Two forms existed, divided by the Appalachian Mountains and
differing slightly in plumage. Like nearly all parrots they nested in
social colonies and used tree cavities, but there seems to be little
information on their exact nesting habits.
In fact considering that
they were once commonly found in large flocks (sometimes containing
three or four hundred birds), ranged over a vast area, and weren’t all
that difficult to see (they apparently kept up a noisy chatter when
feeding and gave a loud, screeching “qui…qui.qui..qui——–ih” in flight
which was audible from some distance) very little seems to be known
about them at all. What is known is that massive deforestation
throughout most of their range robbed them of food and nesting sites
(which seriously impacted the Passenger Pigeon at the same time of
course); their colorful feathers meant their bodies were in demand by
milliners for decorating hats; they were kept widely as ‘pets’ by
people without the knowledge, skill, or interest in breeding them
(which might have at least meant that when numbers in the wild dropped
there would have been a reservoir of birds in private collections);
and crucially – and again much like the Passenger Pigeon – farmers and
orchard owners detested them because they ate grain and ripped
unripened fruits from fruit trees.
No one is totally sure what finally
finished off the Carolina Parakeet (competition for nesting cavities
with introduced honeybees has been suggested as one factor by the
biologist Daniel McKinley who wrote extensively on the Carolina
Parakeet between 1959 and 1985, and a viral epidemic picked up from
poultry may have scorched through the last remaining birds) but
undoubtedly huge numbers of Carolina Parakeets were shot by farmers
and ‘planters’. Relatively approachable and usually found in flocks it
was not difficult to kill large numbers very quickly. It didn’t help
the long-term future of the Carolina Parakeet too that – as John James
Audubon points out in the quotation below – the parrots would
repeatedly circle and hover over injured members of their flock making
them even easier targets.
http://10000birds.com/the-carolina-parakeet.htm
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