The Carolina Parakeet
The only parrot of the American east, undone by its own devotion.
- EXISTED
- Until 1918
- WHERE
- Eastern United States
- LOST
- 21 February 1918
- CAUSE OF LOSS
- Shot for its feathers and as a crop pest; its loyalty made it easy to kill
The Carolina parakeet was the only parrot native to the eastern United States, a flash of green and gold and crimson in the forests of a continent not usually imagined to have parrots at all. It was killed for its bright feathers, which decorated ladies’ hats, and as a pest of orchards and grain.
Its undoing was its tenderness: when one bird was shot, the rest of the flock would not flee but wheel back to circle their fallen companions, so that a hunter could destroy an entire flock from a single spot. The last of them, a male named Incas, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, grieving (the keepers said) for his mate Lady Jane, who had died the year before, and dying, by terrible coincidence, in the same cage that had held the last passenger pigeon.
Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on 21 February 1918, in the very same cage where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had died less than four years before.