Samantha's Great Lakes Parrot
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Species Information
Quaker Parrots (Myiopsitta monachus)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus), also known as the Quaker Parrot, is a species of parrot that originated in the temperate areas of Argentina and Brazil in South America. It is the only member of the genus Myiopsitta.
There are four subspecies:
- M. m. monachus, southeastern Brazil, Uruguay, and northeastern Argentina
- M. m. calita, western and southern Argentina
- M. m. cotorra, southeastern Bolivia, Paraguay, northern Argentina, and southern Brazil
- M. m. luchsi an isolated population in Bolivia which is smaller and may deserve species status.
This parrot is, on average, 11.5 in long with a 18 in wingspan, and weighs 100 g. Females tend to be 10-20% smaller. It has bright green upperparts. The forehead and breast are pale grey and the rest of the underparts are very-light green to yellow. The flight feathers are dark blue, and the tail is long and tapering. The bill is orange. The call is a loud and throaty graaa or skveet. Domestic breeds have produced colors other than the natural plumage; these include white, blue, and yellow in place of green.
The Monk Parakeet is the only parrot that builds a stick nest, in a tree or on a man-made structure, rather than using a hole in a tree. This gregarious species often breeds colonially, building a single large nest with separate entrances for each pair. In the wild, the colonies can become quite large, with pairs occupying separate "apartments" in nests that can reach the size of a small automobile. These nests can attract many other tenants including birds of prey such as the Spot-winged Falconet, ducks such as the Speckled Teal and even mammals. Their 5-12 eggs hatch in about 24 days.
Unusually for a parrot, Monk Parakeet pairs occasionally have helper individuals, often a grown offspring, which assists with feeding the young (see kin selection).
Monk Parakeets are highly intelligent, social birds. Those kept as pets routinely develop large vocabularies. They have been described as one of the top ten "talking" bird species, able to learn scores of words and phrases http://www.butnowyouknow.com/oatmeal.html]. This species is considered especially adept at learning to "talk", only the African Grey Parrot having a better reputation for doing so.[citation needed] The lifespan of Monk Parakeets has been quoted to be from 15-20 years [1], to 25-30 years [2].
The Monk Parakeet was brought to the United States in the late 1960s as a pet. Many escaped or were intentionally released, and populations were allowed to proliferate. By the early 1970s, it was established in seven states, and by 1995 it had spread to eight more. There are now thought to be approximately 100,000 in Florida alone.
As one of the few temperate-zone parrots, the Monk Parakeet is more able than most to survive cold climates, and colonies exist as far north as New York City, Chicago, Cincinnati, coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut, and southwestern Washington. This hardiness makes this species second only to the Rose-ringed Parakeet amongst parrots as a successful introduced species.
In addition they have found a home within Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York after an accidental release decades ago[5]. While the grounds crew initially tried to destroy the unsightly nests at the entrance gate, they no longer do so, because the presence of the parrots has reduced the number of pigeons nesting within it. The management's decision was based on a comparative chemical analysis of pigeon feces (which destroy brownstone structures) and Monk Parakeet feces (which have no ill effect). Oddly then, the Monk Parakeets are in effect preserving this historic structure.
Brooklyn College uses it as an "unofficial" mascot—it features on the masthead of its student magazine—as a result of the colony the species has established in its campus grounds.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Quaker Parrot".