Birdtober Day Eight: Conure

Photo Source: eBird.com

If you look up "Conure" on eBird, you won't find anything, because the word refers to a class of birds rather than a specific species. A conure is a small to medium sized parrot or a large parakeet in the Americas. The Burrowing Parakeet, pictured above, is an example. It's sometimes called a Patagonian conure.

I decided to write about an extinct conure, the Carolina Parakeet. Since I had read that these birds were extinct, I was surprised to see that there were three listings on eBird with photos. When I clicked on them, I saw that they were all photos of pages from books, descriptions of Carolina Parakeets, in the context of Alexis de Toqueville reminiscing about gleefully killing them in 1831. De Toqueville's friend Gustave de Beaumont commented how bored they would have been during their time in Tennessee if they hadn't had the chance to kill birds. Now these "red and yellow parrots unequalled in their beauty," in de Beaumont's phrase, are nothing but words on a page. The last Carolina Parakeet died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918.

 

 

 

Imagine
the red and yellow parrots
unequalled in their beauty
flying around the woods
of Memphis, Tennessee.


Imagine
the red and yellow
unequalled in their beauty
flying around the woods
of Memphis, Tennessee.


Imagine
     red and yellow
                             beauty
flying around
     Memphis, Tennessee.


Imagine

                               beauty
flying


Imagine. 

©Ruth Bowen Hersey