Brown-headed parakeet

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Brown-headed parakeet †
Perru disparue.jpg

Brown -headed parakeet † ( Cyanoramphus ulietanus )

Systematics
Class : Birds (aves)
Order : Parrots (Psittaciformes)
Family : True parrots (Psittacidae)
Tribe : Flat-tailed Parakeets (Platycercini)
Genre : Running parakeets ( Cyanoramphus )
Type : Brown-headed parakeet †
Scientific name
Cyanoramphus ulietanus
( JF Gmelin , 1789)

The brown-headed parakeet ( Cyanoramphus ulietanus ) is an extinct parrot from the genus of the parakeet .

description

It reached a length of 25 centimeters. His head was chocolate brown. The beak showed a light blue-gray color and had a black tip. The back and wings were colored brown. The back of the back and the tail covers had a reddish brown tint. The under wing-coverts and the feather shafts were gray-violet. The chest, belly and under tail-coverts were yellow ocher. The central tail feathers were olive brown and the outer blue-gray. The feet were gray-brown. The eyes were orange.

Occurrence

Its occurrence was limited to Raiatea ( Society Islands ). He probably lived in wooded areas.

die out

The brown-headed parakeet is only known from two museum specimens, about whose year of origin there are contradicting statements. While Erwin Stresemann (1950) and James Cowan Greenway (1958) named the years 1773 or 1774, the New Zealand ornithologist David George Medway (1939-2013) assumed on the basis of old travel diaries that these specimens were in November 1777 during the third Cook -South Sea voyages were shot. Today they are in the Natural History Museum in London and in the Natural History Museum in Vienna . Nothing is known about the reasons for its extinction, but it is believed to have died out shortly after its discovery.

literature

  • James Greenway: Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. 2nd Edition. Dover, New York 1967.
  • David Day: The Doomsday Book of Animals. Viking, New York 1981, ISBN 0-670-27987-0 .
  • Errol Fuller: Extinct Birds. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-19-850837-9 .
  • Tim Flannery, Peter Schouten: A Gap in Nature. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0871137976 .

Web links