Birds We’ve Lost
…and birds we can still save
Note: This is part 3 of a series on the Carolina Parakeet, America’s only native parrot. Part 1 talks about what it was like sharing a world with these birds, and part 2 is about how we drove them extinct.
For the last few years I’ve used John James Audubon’s 1827 painting of Carolina Parakeets as my phone’s wallpaper. The painting captures the raucous, playful energy spilling from a clan of these birds. Individually, they burst with intelligence, curiosity, and personality. Together, their bodies blur in a writhing flurry of green feathers accentuated by pops of red from each expectant face.
I’d invite you to spend a minute looking at this painting, focusing on each of the parrots in turn. One bird sweeps past in mid-flight over the top of the canvas, while another cranes its head in greeting. In the center, a parakeet is about to use its beak as an extra limb to climb up the cocklebur branch. A demure parakeet on the left raises a claw in greeting, or maybe just to scratch its head. At its shoulder, we see an all-green bird, still waiting for its red and yellow feathers to grow in, which tells us that the bird is only a few months old. Finally, the bottom parrot breaks the fourth wall. It stares directly out of the canvas and into the eyes of the viewer. It seems to be saying, “I’m here, I see you.”
To capture his subjects in all their lifelike energy, Audubon strung bird carcasses up with wires to imitate different realistic poses, and rushed to finish his paintings before the bodies started to decompose. Each of the birds in this painting was once a living parakeet that Audubon or his assistants killed. In exchange for their lives, he gave them immortality.
For all the research and writing that’s been done on these birds, for all the museum exhibits and artistic tributes created since their extinction, I still think this painting is the best resource we have to understand what it was like to share a world with the Carolina Parakeet. I keep it on my phone as a reminder of what we’ve lost, and what we can still save.
For something like three million years, Carolina Parakeets held uninterrupted dominion over North America. Leaving their Amazonian cousins behind, they colonized the continent around the time that Panama first linked the two American land masses together. Millennia before homo sapiens sparked fire, parakeets shrieked through swampy lowlands and Appalachian forests, drowning out the grunts and roars of mastodons and saber-toothed cats. Their territory ebbed and flowed with each ice age, fleeing or chasing the glaciers whenever they crept south or retreated north. When humans first reached North America 18,000 or so years ago, they were greeted by Carolina Parakeets.
When the parrots gave a cacophonous welcome to European colonists, the settlers treated the birds with annoyance.
Being annoyed at a bird is a luxury. It’s an ever-more-fleeting reminder that beings other than we have volition, a volition that sometimes runs counter to ours. We’re forced to reckon with the fact that we’re not alone on this earth, but share it with other selfish souls who couldn’t care less about our priorities. What a lonely world it would be if we were truly as sovereign and unique as we so often pretend!
The European settlers unleashed what amounted to a relentless assault on the parrots and on everything the parrots needed to survive. They were harvested for their meat; they were captured for the pet trade; they were killed for their feathers. Americans slaughtered the parrots and destroyed their land until every parrot was gone.
People only seemed to start caring about the birds once it was clear they were destined for extinction. After the Carolina Parakeet had already entered its terminal decline, one writer reflected, “however destructive the parrakeet (sic) may once have been, it is certainly deplorable that so handsome and interesting a bird, our only representative of so interesting a family, should be persecuted to utter extermination.”1
It’s easy to criticize our forebears for their selfishness, their cruelty, their lack of foresight. How could they kill off such a unique and beautiful bird for the crime of indulging in a farmer’s apples? If the Carolina Parakeet were alive today, surely we would take much better care of it.
But would we?
Unfortunately for the birds in question, we’ve produced dozens of damning counterfactuals. True, we stopped slaughtering birds for their meat and feathers, and we outlawed keeping wild birds as pets. Yet we’ve transformed the country into one in which they’re unable to survive. We continue to drain swamps and tear down forests, which we’ve replaced with corn and soybeans. To protect these crops, we unleashed new and ever-more-potent chemicals which have decimated the insect populations on which birds depend for survival. Our windows kill 600 million birds every year, and our cats kill four times that many.
Today, there are seventy species of American birds that are on the tipping point of disappearing. These species have lost more than fifty percent of their population since 1970 and are on track to lose another fifty percent by 2070. Bobolinks, chimney swifts, evening grosbeaks, golden-winged warblers, greater sage-grouse, king rails, least terns, pinyon jays, prairie warblers, ruddy turnstones, stilt sandpipers, whimbrels, and yellow-billed loons are all beautiful, unique, charismatic, and impressive birds. And all of them will go extinct if their population trends are not reversed. Each vanished bird would receive stirring eulogies, pages in history books, exhibits in museums, and think pieces in the New York Times. But they deserve to be celebrated while they’re still alive. More importantly, they deserve our every effort to make their populations flourish once more.
Today, America is once again home to wild parrots. Nanday Parakeets in Los Angeles, Monk Parakeets in New York, Yellow-chevroned Parakeets in Miami, Lilac-crowned Amazons in San Diego, and dozens more species in dozens more cities leaked from the exotic pet trade, creating beachheads for colonization far from their native lands. Some of the species are severely threatened in their home range, diminished by habitat destruction or by the pet trade that brought them to America in the first place. In a great irony, their sunny enclaves in Houston or Fort Lauderdale represent a backup for the species, an insurance policy that the Carolina Parakeet never had.2
Back in May I took a trip to San Francisco. I was most excited to spend time with an old friend, but I was second most excited to see the city’s Red-masked Parakeets. Sometime in the 1960s a shipment of the parrots was released, and they found the city’s gardens and palm trees to be a hospitable home. These birds became America’s most famous parrot colony following the 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and a later book by the same name.
During the first few days of the trip I didn’t seek the birds out, just hoping that I’d happen upon them near where I was staying. And day after day, I missed the birds. By my last evening in town, I realized I’d have to go looking for the parrots if I was going to see them. My friend kindly drove me across town to the Embarcadero, where the birds have become such a conspicuous presence that they’ve earned their own location on Google Maps called Parrot Park.
Even before we got out of the car, the raucous screeching we heard through the rolled-down windows let us know that we’d found the birds. I stepped out of the car and immediately saw the parrots darting from tree to tree. One bird would chase another around, enacting a drama that only they were privy to. For no apparent reason, an entire flock of fifty or sixty birds would burst from one tree, wheel around the park, and settle invisibly back where they started. While they were flying around, the deafening green birds were impossible to miss. Once they landed in a tree, they were impossible to find, blending seamlessly into the foliage.
Hearing the birds drown out the noise of cars and other park-goers, seeing how completely the parakeets had made the park their own, I couldn’t help thinking of the world we lost when Carolina Parakeets disappeared. Like Thoreau, I wanted to “know an entire heaven and entire earth,” and mourned the stars plucked out by those who came before us. But I also felt immense wonder at the worlds we still have, the birds – both native and naturalized – that are worth fighting tooth and nail to preserve.
The Republican. (Oakland, Md.), 13 April 1893. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
Germany was once home to a small feral population, and a certain Baron von Berlepsch “kept for years a whole bevy of Carolina Parakeets on his estate” in Hanover, but when and why these far-flung populations disappeared is unknown.
Robert- I didn’t know about this: “Sometime in the 1960s a shipment of the parrots was released, and they found the city’s gardens and palm trees to be a hospitable home.” So lovely to know! What a wonderful insight into the history of the bird. Thanks for sharing!
We have a colony of monk parakeets in Hyde Park in Chicago too! Love this piece and I adore birds.