Mascarene grey parakeet

The Mascarene grey parakeet is an extinct species of parrot. It was endemic to Mauritius and Réunion in the western Indian Ocean. It has been classified as a member of the tribe Psittaculini, along with other parrots from the Islands. The grey parrots were said to be easy to hunt, as the capture of one would result in its calling out to summon the whole flock.

About Mascarene grey parakeet in brief

The Mascarene grey parakeet is an extinct species of parrot. It was endemic to Mauritius and Réunion in the western Indian Ocean. It has been classified as a member of the tribe Psittaculini, along with other parrots from the Islands. Subfossil bones were first described in 1973 as belonging to a smaller relative of the broad-billed parrot in the genus Lophopsittacus. The species has since been excavated from the Mare aux Songes swamp on Mauritius, from which subfossils of most of the other endemic bird species have been identified as well. The holotype specimen is a mandibular symphysis, with the specimen number UMZC 577a. Other known remains include upper mandibles, a palatine bone, and tarsometatarsi. The grey parrots were said to be easy to hunt, as the capture of one would result in its calling out to summon the whole flock. They were also considered to be crop pests, and being such easy prey meant that they were extensively hunted. Coupled with deforestation, this pushed them into extinction by the 1730s on Réunion and by the 1860s on Mauritian. In 2007 the English palaeontologist Julian P. Hume reclassified L. bensoni as a members of the genus Psittacula, as he found it to be generically distinct from Lophopittacus but similar morphologically to the Alexandrine parrots.

The engraving depicted the method of catching parrots in 1602 shows the dodos killing a dugos, and parrots killing a dodos. The only definite depiction of this species to date is in the 1648 published version of Dutch captain Willem van van Westen’s journal, which may be the only depiction of the grey parrot according to contemporary accounts of the time. In 1967, American ornithologist James Greenway speculated that 17th- and 18th-century reports of then-unidentifiedGrey parrots on Mauritians referred to the broadbilledParrot. In 1987, English ecologist Anthony S. Cheke correlated the L. benoni subfosils with the greyParrots reported from Mauritius. In 1998, the species was reassigned to the genus PsittACula, which had previously been ignored, or considered references to broad- billed parrots by some scientists. In 2003, British ornithologists reclassified the species as L. Benson’s parrot, in honour of Constantine W. Benson, for his work on birds from the Indian Ocean, and in classifying bird collections at Cambridge. It is now thought that the species is a subspecies of Necropsittacus or a wide-beaked form of Mascarinus.

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