Brown-throated Parakeet

Eupsittula pertinax

Green above with paler yellowish belly and long, pointed tail. Average size for a parakeet. Distinctive brown cheek and upper breast usually quite obvious; can be trickier to see in flight. Almost always in small flocks, which feed inconspicuously on fruit in gardens, forest edges, and second growth. More obvious in flight; listen for grating, squeaky calls.

Identification

The brown-throated parakeet is 23 to 28 cm (9.1 to 11 in) long and weighs 76 to 102 g (2.7 to 3.6 oz). The sexes are alike. Adults of the nominate subspecies E. p. pertinax have a yellow forehead, face, and chin. Their crown, nape, and upperparts are green. Their breast is dull olive and their belly grass green with an orange patch in its center. Their wings are mostly green with dullish blue edges and tips on the flight feathers; their tail feathers are also green with dullish blue edges and tips. Immature birds have very little yellow.The other subspecies differ from the nominate thus:

Taxonomy

The brown-throated parakeet was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other parrots in the genus Psittacus and coined the binomial name Psittacus pertinax. The brown-throated parakeet is now one of five species placed in the genus Eupsittula that was introduced in 1853 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek eu meaning "good" with the Modern Latin psittula meaning "little parrot". The specific epithet pertinax is Latin meaning "tenacious" or "persistent".These 14 subspecies are recognized; some of them are island endemics: Subspecies E. p. ocularis has sometimes been treated as a separate species, the "Veraguas parakeet".

Scientific name: Eupsittula pertinax
Authority: (Linnaeus, 1758)
Order: Psittaciformes
Family: Psittacidae
Genus: Eupsittula

Range and habitat

The subspecies of the brown-throated parakeet are found thus:The nominate subspecies of the brown-throated parakeet was introduced in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands and was established by the 1860s. From there it spread to Culebra Island, Tortola, and Puerto Rico but had been extirpated from them by about 1982. More recent sightings in Puerto Rico and those in Florida, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Dominica, and San Andrés are known or suspected to be of escaped or released cage birds rather than deliberate introductions or natural arrivals.The species is a non-breeding visitor to Trinidad.The brown-throated parakeet inhabits a wide variety of landscapes including savannas, arid scrublands, mangroves, tropical deciduous forests, gallery forests, evergreen forests, and cultivated areas and pastures with some remaining trees. In Colombia, it reaches an elevation of 2,600 m (8,500 ft) but is found mostly below 1,200 m (3,900 ft) elsewhere. It is also widely distributed in Venezuela, but shows preference for areas with open vegetation with higher probabilities of occurrence in the savannas of the Llanos bioregion and the arid scrublands of northwestern Venezuela.

Migration: Resident species

Behavior

Some populations on the mainland make seasonal movements and others are somewhat nomadic to follow the availability of food.The brown-throated parakeet's diet includes seeds, fruits, nuts, flowers, leaves, and sometimes insects. A study in Venezuela found that up to 70% of its food in the study area came from human-planted, rather than wild, sources. The species is a significant crop pest, especially on maize and other field crops in Colombia and Venezuela, and in fruit plantations in the Leeward Antilles. It has been observed feeding on cactus. The species typically forages in pairs or small flocks. Flocks will call in flight, and if an actively foraging flock responds, the others may join it.The brown-throated parakeet's nesting season varies throughout its range. It may nest at almost any time of year in Suriname and the Antilles, and from February to April in Colombia and Venezuela. It usually excavates a cavity in a nest of an arboreal termite, often one from the genus Nasutitermes. Furthermore, it also nests in natural cavities in a tree, on a cliff face, or in an earthen bank. Often several pairs will nest in a single rotten tree. The clutch size is two to seven eggs. In captivity, the incubation period is 23 days. In the wild, the time to fledge is 36 to 37 days.The brown-throated parakeet is very vocal. Its flight calls "include high-pitched screeching and harsh grating 'scraart scraart' cries, rapidly repeated." It also makes "shorter, bisyllabic 'tchrit tchrit' and 'cherr cheedit'" calls, and from a perch "similar calls and chattering notes."Brown-throated parakeet contact calls show character shifts between different locations, and by most measures the calls from islands are more variable. These changes in island parakeets' calls may be a response to both the windy environment with poor sound transmission, and the isolation of the populations living on small islands.

Conservation

Population trend: stable

Photos

Distribution

Bird Calls

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