Blue-headed Parrot
Pionus menstruus
Medium-sized parrot, short square tail, body all green with blue head and red undertail coverts. Plumage is distinctive if seen well. Sexes alike. Note deep wingbeats that don’t come above horizontal on the upbeat. Screeching call note rises noticeably in pitch, usually given doubled or tripled.
Identification
The blue-headed parrot is about 28 cm (11 in) long and weighs 245 g (8.6 oz). It is mainly green with a blue head, neck and upper breast, red undertail coverts, and some yellowish on the wing coverts. The upper mandible is black with reddish areas on both sides. They have dark ear patches. In addition to the well-known nominate subspecies found throughout most of the species' South American range, there are two more localized subspecies: rubrigularis from southern Central America and the Chocó has an overall paler plumage and typically a relatively distinct pinkish patch on the throat, and reichenowi from the Atlantic Forest in east Brazil has a paler bill and most of the underparts blue. In all subspecies the male and the female are alike, and juvenile birds have less blue on the head, as well as red or pinkish feathers around the ceres. They moult into their adult plumage at about 8 months of age, but it can take up to two years for the full blue hood to emerge.
Taxonomy
The blue-headed parrot was formally described in 1766 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the twelfth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other parrots in the genus Psittacus and coined the binomial name Psittacus menstruus. Linnaeus based his description on earlier accounts by Mathurin Jacques Brisson and George Edwards. In 1760 Brisson had published a description of "Le perroquet a teste bleue de la Guiane" from a preserved specimen that had been collected in French Guiana. In 1764 Edwards had included a description and a hand-coloured etching of a live bird in the third volume of his Gleanings of Natural History. The blue-headed parrot is now one of eight parrots placed in the genus Pionus that was introduced in 1832 by the German naturalist Johann Georg Wagler. The genus name is from Ancient Greek piōn, pionos meaning "fat". The specific epithet menstruus is Latin meaning "menstrual".<p>Three subspecies are recognised:<p>Birdlife International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature treat the subspecies P. m. reichenowi as a separate species, the blue-breasted parrot (Pionus reichenowi).
- Scientific name
- Pionus menstruus
- Authority
- (Linnaeus, 1766)
- Order
- Psittaciformes
- Family
- Psittacidae
- Genus
- Pionus
Range and habitat
In South America, the blue-headed parrot is mainly an Amazonian species, including in the southeast the neighboring Araguaia-Tocantins River system as its eastern limit; a disjunct population lives southeastwards on Brazil's South Atlantic coast, a coastal strip from Pernambuco in the north to Espírito Santo state in the south, about 1500 km long. In northwest South America the range continues into Central American Panama to Costa Rica. It avoids the northern Andes cordillera spine, and a smaller contiguous area of central Venezuela and northern Colombia. A Pacific Ocean coastal strip continues the range, from southern Ecuador, north to Caribbean areas of northwestern Colombia and western Venezuela.
- Migration
- Resident species
Behavior
They eat fruit, flowers and seeds, and sometimes grain.<p>The blue-headed parrot nests in tree cavities. The eggs are white and there are usually three to five in a clutch. The female incubates the eggs for about 26 days and the chicks leave the nest about 70 days after hatching.
Conservation
- Population trend
- stable
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
Other Birds
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