Seychelles Parakeet

The Seychelles Parakeet was a medium-sized green parrot found nowhere on Earth but the granitic Seychelles, a scatter of forested islands in the western Indian Ocean. It belonged to the same genus as the widespread rose-ringed parakeet, yet it had followed its own path in isolation and became a distinct island species, recorded chiefly on Mahe and Silhouette with reports from a few neighbouring islands. Nineteenth-century naturalists described a noisy, conspicuous bird that travelled in small parties through native forest and over the edges of cultivated land, flashing green as it crossed clearings.

Its story is a short and sobering one. The parakeet was already scarce by the 1870s, and it disappeared within a single human generation. The brothers Edward and Alfred Newton, writing in 1876, noted that the birds were being shot everywhere because of the damage they did to maize and other crops, and they openly predicted the species was doomed. They were right. The last wild individuals are generally placed in the 1880s, a handful of captives lingered a little longer, and by around 1906 the Seychelles Parakeet was gone. It stands today as one of the clearest cases of a small-island bird driven to extinction by direct persecution combined with the loss of the forest it depended on.

The Seychelles Parakeet is known only from a small number of museum skins and a handful of written descriptions, so identification is now a matter of history rather than fieldcraft. It was a mostly green parrot with the long, strongly graduated tail typical of its genus, and observers likened it to a larger, duller version of a male rose-ringed parakeet. The heavy red bill and a dark collar marking on the neck were its most quoted features.

Male vs. female

Because so few specimens were ever collected, the differences between male and female Seychelles Parakeets were never carefully worked out. In its close relatives the sexes differ mainly in the neck ring: adult males wear a well-defined dark collar while females and young birds show it faintly or not at all. The scattered notes on Psittacula wardi suggest a similar pattern, with the blackish collar most obvious on adult males, but no series of birds large enough to confirm this was ever assembled before the species vanished.

Juveniles

Nothing reliable was recorded about the appearance of young Seychelles Parakeets. By analogy with the rose-ringed and Alexandrine parakeets, juveniles were almost certainly a plainer, more uniform green than adults, lacking the neck collar and with a duller, less richly coloured bill that brightened to full red as the bird matured. Any description beyond that would be guesswork, and honest natural history admits how little was ever written down before the chance to observe them was lost.

Contemporary accounts describe the Seychelles Parakeet as loud and far-carrying, giving harsh, screeching calls in flight much like other members of its genus. Nineteenth-century writers remembered the noise of small flocks crossing open ground more than any musical quality, which fits the raucous kee-ak screeches typical of Psittacula parakeets everywhere. No sound recording was ever made, and no naturalist attempted to write the calls down in detail, so the true range of its voice is now unknowable.

The species was confined to the granitic Seychelles in the western Indian Ocean, a compact archipelago of ancient granite islands lying well north of Madagascar. The most reliable records come from Mahe, the largest island, and from Silhouette, with less certain reports from a handful of other islands nearby. It was never known from the low coral islands of the outer Seychelles.

Within its islands the parakeet occupied native forest, wooded hillside valleys and the edges of cultivation. That last habitat was its undoing: as settlers cleared the lowland forest for coconut and other plantations through the nineteenth century, the birds were pushed into closer contact with farmland, where their appetite for grain put them squarely in the path of anyone defending a maize crop. There was no seasonal escape and nowhere else to go. A bird restricted to a few small islands has no reserve population to draw on when things turn against it.

The Seychelles Parakeet fed on the fruit, seeds and buds of native trees, and like parrots the world over it readily turned to whatever the arrival of farming put within reach. It raided ripening maize and other cultivated crops, stripping cobs and taking grain, and this habit earned it a lasting reputation as a pest.

That reputation mattered more than the actual damage. Crop-raiding gave settlers a reason to shoot the birds on sight, and on islands where the entire world population might number only a few hundred parakeets, sustained shooting was something the species simply could not absorb. The same adaptable, opportunistic feeding that lets mainland parakeets thrive alongside people became, on a small and shrinking island, a fatal liability.

Breeding was barely documented before the species disappeared, and no confirmed nest of the Seychelles Parakeet was ever described in detail. Like all its close relatives it is presumed to have nested in tree cavities, using natural hollows or old holes in mature forest trees, and to have laid a small clutch of white eggs incubated by the female.

This reliance on old-growth trees, if it held true, would have compounded the bird's troubles. Cavity-nesting parrots need large, mature timber, exactly the trees felled first when lowland forest is cleared for plantations. A species losing both its nest sites and its adults to the gun at the same time had little chance of recovery, and no captive-breeding effort of any kind was attempted while it still might have helped.

You cannot attract or see a Seychelles Parakeet: the species has been extinct for well over a century, and it exists today only as a few faded museum skins in collections such as those in Cambridge and Paris. What you can still do is visit the islands it once flew over and watch the parakeet that comes closest to filling its place, while reading the granite forests as a reminder of how quickly an island endemic can be lost.

• Visit Mahe and Silhouette in the Seychelles, the parakeet's former strongholds, where remnant native forest survives in protected reserves like the Morne Seychellois National Park.
• Look for the Seychelles Black Parrot (Coracopsis barklyi) on nearby Praslin, the only parrot still living wild in the Seychelles and a poignant survivor to watch instead.
• Support and visit island conservation reserves such as those run for the Seychelles magpie-robin and warbler, which show how intensive protection can pull an island bird back from the brink.
• See museum specimens where they are displayed, the surviving skins are the only way to view the actual plumage of Psittacula wardi.
• To watch a close living relative, seek out the widespread rose-ringed parakeet, now common across Africa, Asia and many introduced city populations worldwide.

• Rose-ringed Parakeet: The closest living relative, smaller and brighter, with a wide native range across Africa and Asia and many introduced urban populations
• Alexandrine Parakeet: A larger Asian Psittacula with a red shoulder patch and similar long graduated tail