Doomed to an Early Extinction
How we lost the Carolina Parakeet, America's only native parrot.
Note: This is part 2 of a series on the now-extinct Carolina Parakeet. Read part 1 here.
As America’s first ornithologist, Alexander Wilson needed samples of each bird he studied. This meant killing a lot of birds.
Wilson, a Scotsman who had made America his home, was undertaking an audacious project to paint every one of the young country’s birds, something that had never been attempted before. The drawings that existed to that point might be recognizable to someone familiar with their source material, but they didn’t come close to ornithological accuracy. Wilson wanted to fix all that. But this was in the days before cameras, before even binoculars. To a painter-naturalist like Wilson, a bird in the hand was worth infinitely more than two in the bush.
In 1810, Wilson traveled to a mineral spring in Kentucky called Big Bone Lick, where he found a large, deafening flock of what was arguably America’s most colorful and charismatic bird. A screaming mass of Carolina Parakeets came rocketing through the forest, wheeled around the clearing where Wilson was sitting, and settled down to drink the salty water at the spring. So many landed on the muddy ground that it seemed to be “covered with a carpet of the richest green, orange, and yellow.”
However enchanting this sight must have been, Wilson wasn’t there to birdwatch. He raised his shotgun, loaded with birdshot, and fired into the mass of parrots, and then fired again. And again. The tiny lead pellets brought down a dozen of the closely-clustered birds at each blast, while barely damaging their feathers. Mangled birds would be no use to his science.
Of course, not all of the birds caught in the line of fire were killed. Wilson found one that was slightly injured in the wing, still vigorous but unable to fly, and decided to make it his pet. He named it Poll.
Wilson’s parrot was not the most willing captive. When he first put Poll in a cage, it occupied itself “gnawing the sticks that formed its place of confinement, in order to make a practicable breach.” Whenever he forced it back in, he wrote that “we generally had a quarrel; during which it frequently paid me in kind for the wound I had inflicted, and for depriving it of liberty, by cutting and almost disabling several of my fingers with its sharp and powerful bill.” When they traveled, Wilson wrapped the bird in a silk handkerchief and stuffed it in his pocket, but it often wormed its way out and forced him to get off his horse and chase down the mostly-flightless bird through brambles and across streams.
While Poll never showed much interest in trying to imitate human speech, Wilson did succeed in teaching the bird to come when it was called by its name, to climb on his clothes, and to take food from his mouth. In spite of these signs of domestication, Poll still longed for freedom. Sometimes when Wilson left Poll in its cage, its calls would attract passing flocks of parakeets, who would land in nearby trees and carry on sympathetic conversations with the captive bird.
The unhappy prisoner never abandoned its quest for freedom. Wilson took the bird with him as he sailed across the Gulf of Mexico, and early one morning while Wilson was sleeping, Poll squeezed out of its crate. Fluttering off the boat, it chose death at sea over one more day in a cage.1
In Wilson’s day, the relationship between humans and beasts was tactile. There was no barrier of law, custom, or morality separating people and the animals outside their door, and young parrots were regularly kidnapped from their forest homes to be sold as pets. But for the most part people found that Carolina Parakeets were actually more useful dead than alive. Their meat could make a tolerable meal and their feathers could make an attractive hat. More often, they were killed because they were a bother to farmers. And people took freely and frequently, until there were no more parrots left to take.
Many European colonists saw America’s abundance of birds as a fine selection of colorful, charming music boxes. Stick one in a cage and it would fill your home with constant song and entertainment. But Carolina Parakeets were never the most popular choice. Alexander Wilson wrote that while “Parrots and Parakeets, from foreign countries, abound in almost every street of our large cities, and become such great favorites, no attention seems to have been paid to our own, which in elegance of figure and beauty of plumage is certainly superior to many of them.”
Carolina Parakeets weren’t the easiest pets to keep. They had a powerful and eager bite, and would “cut to atoms pieces of wood, books, and, in short, every thing that comes their way,”2 including, as Wilson learned, the fingers of their captors. They were also insufferably noisy. “Were it not for its piercingly shrill screeching notes,” explained Robert Ridgway in 1889, “this species would be a great favorite as a cage bird, on account of its great beauty and extreme docility; but its distracting, ‘ear-splitting’ notes render it extremely undesirable as a pet.”3 But the main novelty of owning a parrot was to teach it to imitate human speech, and for all their enthusiasm for communication they never showed much interest in learning human words.
Yet despite all that, there was still money to be made in carting the birds off to market. In New England, which lay outside the parrots’ range, the birds were sometimes “sent as a present by some southern friend, or brought for sale by sailors from the seacoast towns.”4 Unscrupulous pet sellers also passed the birds off as juveniles of some more desirable parrot species, promising that they were “just at the right age to be taught the English language.”5 For whatever reason, Carolina Parakeets seemed to be more popular in pets in Europe, where they were frequently exported.
Pet merchants captured birds by placing a net around the parakeets’ nest hole, chopping down roost trees with birds inside of them, or attracting parakeets to a decoy bird. Those with less patience or skill would sometimes just shoot the birds in an attempt to wing them (as Wilson had done accidentally) and gather up the wounded birds, but they ended up killing twenty parakeets for each one they captured.
Fortunately, the birds killed along the way weren’t a complete loss. Lots of people ate parakeets, although the dish had plenty of critics. While he wasn’t much of a fan of the birds himself, John James Audubon wrote that “their flesh is tolerable food, when they are young, on which account many of them are shot.”6 Wilson also tried the birds, but found their meat “very indifferent.” Several times, he’d eaten parakeet “from necessity in the woods; but found it merely passable.”
Far more often, the birds were killed by farmers energetically defending their crops. Carolina Parakeets were drawn to fruit trees, and the apples, pears, pecans, grapes, and even wheat and barley planted by European settlers made for an attractive buffet. An 1865 issue of The Cultivator explained how these birds drew farmers’ resentment: “A pear tree may be loaded down with green fruit, and the owner congratulating himself upon the prospect of a nice crop, when lo! he wakes up in the morning to find the tree stripped of all its fruit by a flock of these birds.”
What angered the farmers even more was that the birds often plucked fruits off the trees without even bothering to eat them. A 19th-century observer saw how they’d “appear delighted with the fruitless frolic of plucking apples from the trees, and strewing them on the ground untasted.”7
Other writers downplayed the birds’ impact on crops, saying that “these parakeets may sometimes do a little mischief in the gardens, though the produce of the gardens is pretty nearly over by the time that they begin to flock,” meaning that it was “more cruel than wise”8 to slaughter the birds Yet according to Audubon, that’s exactly how farmers responded:
“Do not imagine, reader, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters. So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them… The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition.” 9
With every farmer responding to the birds this way, it’s not surprising that the parakeets were starting to disappear, and Audubon was possibly the first to notice the trend. In 1842 he wrote that “our parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen.”
In just a few decades, it became the conventional wisdom that the Carolina Parakeet’s “ultimate fate must be … extermination.”10 An 1885 visitor’s guide to the Smithsonian Institution noted that a pair of stuffed Parakeets could be found in the museum’s rotunda, providing “much amusement and instruction to visitors.” The guide explained that fifty years earlier, America’s only parrot was common throughout much of the country, but now was limited to Florida and the Gulf coast. “It is every year becoming more scarce,” concluded the guide, “and is doubtless doomed to early extinction.”11
As much as ornithologists and proto-conservationists mourned the disappearance of the parakeet, no one suggested doing anything about it. In fact, they did quite the opposite. Fears of the parrot’s imminent disappearance set off a scramble among collectors and scientists to nab one last specimen before the birds were gone forever. Ornithologists with their shotguns rushed to Florida to shoot parakeets, joining the plume hunters and the pet salesmen in nabbing every bird they could find. Of the 800 skins and specimens of Carolina Parakeets that exist today, 660 of them were collected from Florida after 1880.12
Year after year, the parrots were getting harder to find. The last confirmed record of a parakeet being killed in the wild was in 1904. But much of Florida was an impenetrable swamp, a terribly difficult place for northern naturalists to navigate. And even though ornithologists had shot their last bird, locals continued seeing the parakeets into the 1910s and 1920s, sometimes in flocks of seventy or eighty. But sightings were becoming less common every year, until at some point they stopped entirely.
In the 1980s, Noel Snyder interviewed people who had memories of seeing parakeets while they were growing up in Florida. These now-elderly Floridians remembered that large flocks still covered trees and feasted on cabbage palm berries around Lake Okeechobee well into the 20th century. When he was 10 years old, around 1915, Minor McGlaughlin watched parakeets swirl around overhead and felt grateful that the birds ate the cockleburs that plagued his family’s garden. He remembered that parakeets roosted in his grandmother’s barn, and saw them “perched on rafters during the daylight hours and hanging by their bills, lined up along the sides of rafters, at night.”13
Florida was the center of the plume-hunting trade at the end of the 19th century, and many parakeets were swept up by the fashion industry. But by around 1910 all of this had ended, and former plume hunters “knew of no one shooting the birds for their feathers or for any other purpose” by the 1910s.14
Yet something was still killing the birds. Habitat destruction was one possible factor, but the parakeets seemed able enough to live near farms and towns. It was actually this comfort with life alongside people that scientists now consider the most likely culprit. Though there’s no conclusive evidence — and there probably never will be — researchers now think that a disease dealt parakeets the killing blow.
Carolina Parakeets were comfortable snacking on grain and scraps alongside barnyard poultry, and it’s very possible that they picked up a disease from domesticated chickens or geese. Parrots in other parts of the world have proven highly vulnerable to foreign infections, and the communal roosts of these highly-social birds were an ideal setting for an infection to spread.
And not all the evidence is circumstantial. There are a handful of 19th-century records of Carolina Parakeets, mostly pets, that were suddenly struck by “a disease resembling apoplexy,” suffering from fits or seizures before ultimately dying. One writer mentions watching a semi-wild parakeet climb up the trunk of a palmetto when without warning it fell to the ground, dead. There’s no way of knowing if these accounts were isolated cases or if they pointed to an avian epidemic that went otherwise unnoticed at the time. We’ll probably never know for sure.
I’m not convinced it really matters whether we ever prove what killed the last Carolina Parakeet. But the existence of a disease would not absolve us of the guilt of exterminating a unique and intelligent bird millions of years in the making. American colonists subjected the parrots to a multitude of pressures, of which disease may have been only one. If they were not hunted for meat, or hunted for sport, or hunted for feathers, or captured as pets, or if their swampy homes were not drained and their forests not cut down, a disease may not have proved fatal.
All of this speculation can’t bring them back.
Wilson, Alexander. American Ornithology: Or, the Natural History of the Birds of the United States. Illustrated with Plates Engraved and Colored from Original Drawings Taken from Nature, Vol. III. United States: Bradford & Inskeep, 1811.
Audubon, John James. The Birds of America, Volume IV. United States: J.J. Audubon, 1842.
Ridgway, Robert., Forbes, Stephen Alfred. The Ornithology of Illinois. United States: H. W. Rokker, 1889.
Hirst, Henry Beck. The Book of Cage Birds. [By Henry B. Hirst.]. United States: Bernard Duke, 1842.
The Marion daily mirror. (Marion, Ohio), 23 July 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
Audubon, John James. The Birds of America, Volume IV. United States: J.J. Audubon, 1842.
Cassell's Natural History. The Feathered Tribes. London: Cassell, Petter, & Galpin. 1863.
The Universal Pictorial Library: Containing Valuable Papers on Various Subjects, Comprising Natural History, Natural Sciences, Agriculture, Rural Economy, Biography, Fine Arts, the Orientals, Travels, Geography, Botany, Poetry, Miscellaneous Reading, Etc ... Embellished with Over Five Hundred Engravings. United States: J.A. & U.P. James, 1851.
Audubon, John James. The Birds of America, Volume IV. United States: J.J. Audubon, 1842.
Snyder, Noel. “The Carolina Parakeet: Glimpses of a Vanished Bird.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2004.
Rhees, William Jones. Visitor's Guide to the Smithsonian Institution, and United States National Museum in Washington. United States: Judd & Detweiler, 1885.
Snyder, Noel. “The Carolina Parakeet: Glimpses of a Vanished Bird.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2004.
Ibid.
Ibid.
You tell the story of humankind’s destructive habits with a steady voice and yet you still convey the horror of it all. The shooting and killing of so many beautiful birds at once is hard to fathom.
A beautifully told but heartbreaking tale. From Poll, the little hostage, to the extinction of all of his kind ....sigh. This is a loss to be mourned. Imagine how wonderful it would be to see these birds.