The Heath Hen is one of the American birds on the list of extinct birds that helped build awareness about the existence of the phenomenon of extinction. It was a distinct subspecies of the Greater Prairie Chicken native to the East Coast, from New Hampshire down to Virginia. As a member of the grouse family, it was extremely common in…
Category: birds
Cuban Red Macaw
Will you look at how lovely this guy is? This was a species of parrot native to Cuba and the Isla de la Juventud, an island off the Cuban coast. It was one of the smaller types of the macaws, only 18-20 inches long, and the last native Carribean macaw to go extinct. As befits a flashy bird like this…
Passenger Pigeon
Probably the best-known extinct American bird is the Passenger Pigeon: Estimates of the total number of passenger pigeons at the turn of the nineteenth century are around 3 billion, 25 to 40% of all the breeding birds in America. Pigeon migration was a spectacle, as described by John James Audubon: I dismounted, seated myself on an eminence, and began to…
7000 miles
I am very very busy right now, but am nowhere near as busy as your average migrating bird is right about now. Birds cut across the Arctic, cross oceans, hemispheres, start off in Canada, end up in Brazil, fly thousands and thousands of miles all under their own power. Tiny birds that have to lay in layers of fat to…
The Carolina Parakeet
The Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis). Length: 30cm (12in) Description- Adult: forehead, lores, area around eyes and upper cheeks orange; remainder of head, throat and upper part of neck yellow; outer webs of primaries marked yellow towards their base; bend of wing, carpal edge and thighs yellow; rest of plumage green, paler on underparts; bill horn-coloroured; legs and feet pinkish brown…