This is the sobering story of how a young nation loved, laid waste and lost its only parrot. Curiously, within the span of a century, the great flocks dwindled to nothing, and this thing of beauty disappeared. It was the Carolina Parakeet, North America's only native parrot. In America there was once a gem in The Great Forest a winged jewel rivalling any in the tropics. The Carolina Parakeet: America's Lost Parrot In Art And Memory (The latter project of adding mammoth DNA to the Asian elephant genome is further along.) De-extinction projects are already underway for the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth. But the species may squawk again: Today geneticists and conservation biologists often mention the bird as a candidate for “de-extinction,” the process of recreating a vanished species-or at least an approximation of it-from preserved genetic material. The last Carolina parakeet in captivity, a male named Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. “In some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen,” John James Audubon warned in 1831. Yet there are 19th-century accounts of North America’s only native parrot species from places as far-flung as Nebraska and Lake Erie, though even then the noisy flocks were in decline. A native green parrot in the eastern United States? Parrots are supposed to decorate palm trees in the tropics not the cypress of temperate forests. Among all the birds and mammals that once inhabited American forests and still would today if human settlers had not driven them to extinction, the Carolina parakeet seems out of place.
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