Escapes!! the Canary-Winged Parakeet in the US

Bird Talk Magazine, May 2000 Donald Brightsmith

Escapes!! The Canary-winged Parakeet in the US

By Donald Brightsmith

Originally published in Bird Talk Magazine May 2000

As I inched along through the afternoon traffic down the shady streets of the Coral Gables section of Miami I heard the characteristic chattering of a small group of parakeets. I swerved rapidly into a side street, parked, grabbed my binoculars and dove into the suburban jungle to look for the birds. There in the top of a tall fig tree near the edge of the University of Miami campus was a flock of Canary- winged Parakeets (Yellow-chevroned Parakeets). For me these were not just any parakeets, but the reason why I had made the 16-hour drive from North Carolina. It was late May 1996 and I had just agreed to write the Birds of North America Species account on the Canary-winged Parakeet for the American Ornithologists’ Union as part of their effort to summarize what is known about every species that occurs in North America, native or introduced. In this column I will share with you some of my findings and adventures that resulted from my attempts to summarize what is known about Canary-winged Parakeets.

As I began my work I quickly realized that there were two very different types of birds lumped in the species I knew as “Canary-winged Parakeet.” First there is the White-winged Parakeet, an olive-green bird with a yellow band on the upper surface of the wing and white wing feathers that form a huge white wing patch when the bird flies. This form is native to dense river edge forest along the Amazon River in South America from northeastern Peru through Brazil. The other form the Canary-winged or Yellow-chevroned Parakeet is a yellower green, has a darker bill and no white in the wing, but has the yellow band on the upper wing. This species is found in open woodlands and savannahs from Bolivia through southern Brazil. I was confused why two such different looking birds were considered the same species so I contacted Dick Banks the head of the American Ornithologists check list committee to ask him about this. Two weeks after reviewing the literature and the specimens at the Smithsonian Museum he informed me that they should in fact be considered two different species. And just like that I doubled the amount of work because now I had to write two complete accounts, one for each species!

Road trip

I felt I could only learn so much about the species from books so decided it was time to head off to Miami. With the help of old published accounts and a local bird guide, Mort Cooper, I was soon locating small flocks of both species as they zoomed through the parks and yards of Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and other areas of Miami. Mort showed me a Canary Island Date Palm where he estimated as many as 25 pairs of White-winged Parakeets had nested that season. The palm was riddled with about 30 holes chewed out of the bases of the dead palm fronds. Each hole led to a perfectly vertical tunnel, just like most of the nests I have seen of this and related species of www.macawproject.org 1 Bird Talk Magazine, May 2000 Donald Brightsmith

Brotogeris parakeets. This particular palm was interesting because it was located in the entrance courtyard of a lovely temple. Needless to say, as I began to sneak around the grounds at five AM to record the calls of the parakeets it aroused the suspicions of the security guard who kindly asked me to leave.

On the U. of Miami Campus I was checking out an area of palms where White-winged Parakeets nested in the late 1970’s when I came across an active nest of Yellow-chevroned Parakeets. This nest was also in a Canary Island Date Palm, this time sandwiched between a major avenue and a parking lot. So much for these birds needing pristine wilderness, it seems that they are willing to nest almost anywhere. Both species are also not too picky where they eat, and seem to adapt rapidly to the species available in the parks and yards in Miami. I watched birds eating small figs, flowers of bottlebrush trees, and fruits and flowers from a variety of palm trees. Both species also make extensive use of bird feeders. In her masters thesis Crystal Schroads reported that at a single bird feeder a flock of 300-350 White-winged Parakeets would visit every day and this flock consumed about 400 lbs of bird food a month.

As evening approached I followed small groups of birds as they formed together into larger bands and prepared to roost for the night. Following a group of White-wings lead me to Baptist Hospital. Here a group of 80 birds flew in wide noisy circles as the light began to fade. At this point the entire group finally settled down to roost in the tall Royal Palms that lined the entrance drive to the hospital. Here the birds perched in the dense centers of the palms or hung underneath the long drooping palm fronds. The Yellow-chevroned Parakeets also roosted in tall palms, but they roosted independently from the White-wings behind an apartment complex only a few kilometers away.

This segregation by the species was not only confined to roosts, but to all aspects of their lives. Despite the fact that both species were found in the same areas on many occasions, I never saw a mixed pair. In fact in the 126 flocks seen, only one contained a mix of both species. Since these birds almost always travel with their mates, this suggests that the birds are not hybridizing commonly and that theses two forms are in fact different species.

History of the introduction

The proceeding section explained the natural history of these birds, but gives us no idea how the birds came to be in the US in the first place. In 1968 the federal government began keeping good records of the numbers and species of birds that were being imported into the country. Since this time over 300,000 of these birds have been imported. Over 85% the importation occurred from 1968 – 1972 when approximately 230,000 arrived. Most of these were White-wings exported from Peru in these early years. The exportation from Peru reached ridiculously high levels during this period: over 120,000 White-winged Parakeets were exported in 1971 alone!

With such a massive influx of birds into the US it was inevitable that some birds escaped, and the history of these escapes is reflected in the sightings reported by bird watchers and ornithologists. The first report of these parakeets in the wild in the US is of a group of 5 White-wings flying free in Miami in 1965. From here the number of reports and the number of individuals exploded. In 1969 www.macawproject.org 2 Bird Talk Magazine, May 2000 Donald Brightsmith

groups of 50 –75 were roosting in Miami and it was thought that the birds were breeding. By 1971 there was a roosting flock of over 200 in the Coconut Grove section of Miami. By 1974 the species was being seen in the Tampa/ St. Petersburg area on Florida’s west coast and in an area of over 150 miles along Florida’s east coast. At this time the population in the Miami area alone was thought to be nearly 2,000 birds. White-winged parakeets also made a dramatic appearance in other areas. In the early 1970’s small populations established in San Francisco and Los Angeles California, and individuals were seen in Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Virginia.

How can we explain this rapid expansion into the US by this species? The birds were sold for as little as $9.95 each and many of these pets probably escaped or were released by owners that were tired of hearing their harsh chattering. This may go a long way to explain the sources of the occasional escapes in the northern states, but does not seem to explain the rapid explosion in areas such as Miami and Los Angeles. The small local escapes were apparently augmented by larger and more systematic escapes. According to Dr. Levine, owner of Parrot Jungle, most of these birds were imported into the US in crates containing about 300 birds each. From each crate, government officials were required to remove and inspect one bird. The quickest and easiest way to accomplish this was to break a small hole in the side of the crate and grab out a bird. During this process, an average of 6 – 8 birds apparently escaped per crate. If the 230,000 parakeets were imported in crates holding 300 each that would mean that over 760 crates were imported. If 6 – 8 birds escaped per crate, some simple math suggests that 4,500 – 6,000 may have escaped during these government checks. While this may be an over estimate, this line of reasoning fits well with the rapid explosion of this species in Florida and California, states that receive the great majority of the wildlife imported into the US.

Currently in Florida the species is confined to the Miami area where an estimated 150-300 remain. The populations in California persisted at least into the late 1990’s but today only a few individuals remain. Similarly the individuals from other states only survived for a few years and there have been no reports in recent years.

Rise of the Yellow-chevrons

The history of the Yellow-chevroned Parakeet is less clear because observers failed to distinguish between this species and the White-winged Parakeet. In 1993 observers in Miami realized that many of the birds they were seeing and calling “Canary-winged Parakeets” were Yellow-chevrons while in the 1970’s most were White-wings. A similar pattern was also found in Los Angeles California suggesting that something major had happened to cause this change. Looking through the importation records suggested an answer to this dilemma. In 1973, Peru banned the exports of White-winged Parakeets as part of a ban on all species native to the Amazon Basin and the effects of the ban were clear. In the five years before the ban, there were an average of 46,000 White-wings imported to the US annually and afterwards, the average dropped to less than 500. This ban left a void in the market. To fill this void, importers switched to other countries including Bolivia and Argentina where they found an abundant source of Yellow-chevroned Parakeets. This species was a perfect substitute for the White-winged and in fact both were sold under the name Canary-winged www.macawproject.org 3 Bird Talk Magazine, May 2000 Donald Brightsmith

Parakeet. Since 1973, over 70,000 Yellow-chevrons have been imported and it is presumably the escapes from these importations that have become established in the US. As with the White-wings, the centers of the populations are Los Angeles California and Miami Florida. There are over 400 Yellow-chevrons currently living in LA while there are at least a few hundred in Miami. I believe that it is not a coincidence that both species appeared and persisted in LA and Miami as these cities combined receive about 80% of all the birds imported into the United States.

Conservation and the future

During the heyday of importation and the rapid expansion of White-winged Parakeets, wildlife and agriculture department officials began to worry about what negative effects these birds might have if their numbers continued to increase at the high rate observed in the early 1970’s. The birds are known to eat a variety of commercially important fruits including banana, mango, tomato, figs, peaches, plums, and apricots. For this reason agricultural officials feared that the parakeets would expand beyond the confines of the cities in to the surrounding agricultural areas and wreak havoc on fruit crops. Ecologists also worried that the rapidly expanding populations would compete with native fruit eaters as they invaded areas of native vegetation in California and Florida. At this time there was also thought of initiating control measures if the populations continued to increase. But it seems that these worries were all for naught. Today, over 30 years since the first birds escaped, the populations of both species are small; it is unlikely that there are more than 2,000 individuals in the entire US of both species combined. In addition, both species are restricted to urban/suburban habitats that have high a high diversity and high density of fruiting and flowering species that provide a year round food source for the birds. In these urban habitats the birds can be a minor nuisance due to their loud calls and their habit of consuming fruits growing in the yards of homeowners. Other than this, the species are rather innocuous.

The populations of both species seem to be stable or slightly declining. Given that almost none of these birds have been imported since 1989 it suggests that these species may be able to persist in the wild in the US for many more years to come. But in an interesting turn of fate, trappers working in Miami are now capturing some of these birds to sell back in to the pet trade. Many of these captured birds may be second or even third generation in the wild: their grandparents or even great grandparents having been originally imported for sale in pet shops. As a result, it is uncertain how many more years these noisy little neighbors will continue to persist in the wild in the US.

For more information on these species see:

Brightsmith, D. 1999. White-winged Parakeet (Brotogeris versicolurus) and Yellow-chevroned Parakeet (Brotogeris chiriri). In The Birds of North America, No. 386-387 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.) the Birds of North America, Inc. Philadelphia, PA.