Interesting Information About Parrots and Their Allies

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The 315 parrots, parakeets, cockatoos, Lories, lorikeets, macaws, lovebirds, budgerigars, are a diverse group; yet they are so uniform in their diagnostic features that all are recognizable at a glance as members of the parrot order and family. They range in size from the little 3.5 inch pygmy parrots of the Papua region to the gaudy, long-tailed, 40-inch macaws of the Amazon jungles. They vary in shape from plump African lovebirds and South American Amazons to the slender Lories and wildly crested cockatoos of the AustraloMalayan region. The coloring defies summing up in a sentence, but their bodies are usually a solid green, yellow, red, white, or black, with contrasting patches of red, yellow, or blue on the head, wings, or tail.

Identifying characteristics are the large head and short neck, and particularly the strongly down-curved, hooked bill. An equally important structural feature is the parrot's strong, grasping feet with two toes in front and two behind. Parrots also have a broad cere at the base of the bill through which the nostrils open and which is feathered in many birds eggs for sale. Their smallish eyes are often bordered by patches of bare skin, particularly in the larger species. Their rather sparse plumage had powder-downs scattered all through it.

The parrots are a distinctive ancient group well warranting their ordinal rank. They show some affinities in anatomy and in habits to both the pigeons and to the cuckoos. Being essentially arboreal birds, their fossil record is poor. The earliest so far unearthed are of Miocene age, less than 15 million years ago. These show parrots were formerly more widespread in temperate latitude than they are today, spreading north almost to Canada in North America and to France and in Europe.

The parrots' present distribution is pan-tropical. They occur on all lands in the Southern Hemisphere except the southern tip of Africa and the more remote Pacific islands. In the Northern Hemisphere they now reach northern Mexico (central United States, until recently) in the New World and southeastern Asia in the Old. Parrots fall into six major groups, which are sometimes given family rank, but the structural difference between them are so slight that most students today accord them subfamily rank at best.

While they have never been domesticated in the sense that chickens, ducks, and pigeons have, probably more species of parrots have been tamed and raised in captivity than any other group of birds. Primitive tribes have kept them as pets since time immemorial. The talking ability of the African grey Parrot is mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman writings. The parrot's appeal is partly aesthetic, partly anthropomorphic. Coupled with their attractive hues and the ease with which they are tamed and maintained in captivity are their intensely human traits of imitating the human voice, of showing affection to each other, of reacting to flattery, and of using their feet almost as hands. No other bird holds food in one foot and bites pieces off, much as one eats a sandwich. Parrots are extremely long-lived. How long the birds live in the wild, where natural enemies take their toll, is unknown, but individuals have lived upwards of 50 years in captivity, and one is reported to have reached 80.