Carolina Parakeet
(Conuropsis carolinensis)
The Carolina Parakeet once flourished across the bottomland hardwood forests, river corridors, and swamps of eastern North America, from southern New York to Florida. They thrived in these landscapes shaped by seasonal flooding and rich in seeds, fruits, and nesting sites.
The Carolina Parakeet began to decline rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century, disappearing from much of its range within a few decades. By the 1890s it had largely vanished, with the last confirmed wild birds reported from Florida in the early 1900s. The final known individual died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918.
Why the species declined so quickly remains somewhat mysterious. Likely factors included the widespread logging of bottomland forests, sustained shooting and trapping as an agricultural pest species, introduced diseases, and perhaps even the spread of introduced honeybees that took over parakeet nesting cavities. But no single cause has been proven, and the Carolina Parakeet was gone before the emergence of modern conservation efforts, leaving behind a continent that is now bereft of native parrots.
Brightly colored and loudly vocal, this parakeet was a geographic outlier of an otherwise tropical group of small parrots found in Central and South America. Close-knit and social, groups of Carolina Parakeets returned year after year to nest in familiar tree cavities.
Carolina Parakeets and Cocklebur
Cocklebur pods each contain two large seeds that were one of the Carolina Parakeet’s favorite foods, and John James Audubon’s famous painting of this species shown here duly depicts a group of parakeets feeding together on cocklebur.
One of the Carolina Parakeet’s most distinctive habits involved a plant that might seem unlikely as a parrot food source: the cocklebur. These weedy plants remain common along riverbanks, floodplains, and other disturbed ground, and you’ve likely found their hook-covered pods sticking to your socks or the hair of your pet dog after a walk along an Ithaca stream.
Cocklebur seeds are defended by a potent chemical toxin, and most animals suffer badly if they eat them, yet the parakeets were apparently immune to its toxicity. Unsubstantiated accounts even suggest that the parakeets themselves might have retained some of those toxic chemicals in their bodies and thereby been distasteful to their own predators.
We will likely never know if this legend is true, but modern genomic research based on DNA from preserved specimens confirms that the parakeet had evolved specific adaptations for tolerating this type of toxin.
