My first new year blog is about the Rodrigues Parakeet, also called Newton’s Parakeet or Exiled Ring-Necked Parakeet, Latin name: Psittacula exsul. It is an extinct species endemic to the forests of the island of Rodrigues which is the third Mascarene Island besides Mauritius and Reunion.
It was about 40 cm (16 inches) long and mostly a slate greyblue colour which is unusual for its genus, which are otherwise mostly green parrots.
Early reports suggest that it may have hade two colour morphs, One slate blue and the other green but whether the green coloration was borne by recently-fledged birds, or whether at one time a short-lived colony of a related green species that was living on Rodrigues was for long not determinated. Nowadays it is assumed that the Rodrigues Parakeet was a green species and the blue birds were a colour morph.
It was first recorded by François Leguat, the leader of a group of eight French Huguenots who colonised Rodrigues from 1691 to 1693. He said that the parrot was abundant and reported that they fed mainly on nuts of an olive-like tree. He also said that they were good to eat and able to imitate speech. One tamed by them spoke French and Flemish.
Several nineteenth-century visitors mentioned the bird but it was not until the 1870s that specimens reached Europe and the species was described by A. Newton in 1872. He gave the epithet exsul, “exiled” to the latin name in referrence to the refugee Leguat and his exiled Huguenots who mentioned the bird first.
The last recorded sighting was in 1875 and it seems probable that the last few birds were wiped out in the year when the island suffered the worst cyclonic season of the ninetheenth centory with four cyclones in two months, the last - on 27th February 1876 - being one of the most severe of all time.
Only two complete specimens, one male and one female, survive and they are both in the Cambridge University Museum.
The species’ extinction was presumably caused by a combination of habitat loss and hunting.
This painting is a one of a series that is going to be made in the project “Not the way of the Dodo - Endangered species of Mauritius”. One part of the project is portraying extinct species of the Mascarene Islands. The parrot paintings that appear in this project will of course find their way to the WPT bloggers page!
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