Painted parakeet
The painted parakeet, known as the painted conure in aviculture, is a species of bird in subfamily Arinae of the family Psittacidae, the African and New World parrots. It is found in northeastern South America.
Taxonomy
The painted parakeet was described in 1776 as Psittacus pictus by the German zoologist Philipp Statius Müller. Müller gave the locality as Cayenne, now French Guiana. Müller cited "Buffon" as the source of his information on the parakeet. Although the Comte de Buffon published a description of the "La perriche à gorge variée" in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, this was in 1779, after Müller's publication. Instead, Müller had access to the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle, a set of hand-coloured plates engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet that were produced to accompany Buffon's work. Before Buffon, the painted parakeet had been described in 1648 as the "Anaca" by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave and in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson as "La petite perruche brune du Brésil". The specific epithet pictus is from Latin meaning "painted". The painted parakeet is placed in the genus Pyrrhura that was introduced in 1856 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte. The species is considered to be monotypic with no subspecies being recognised.The painted parakeet is a member a group of closely related taxa in the genus Pyrrhura for which there was much uncertainty in the number of taxa and the relationships between them. The 1997 entry for the painted parakeet in the Handbook of the Birds of the World lists nine subspecies. Of these, six are now treated as separate species, and two have been synonymized with other taxa. Most of the uncertainty with the taxonomy was resolved by a comprehensive molecular genetic study of the parrots by Brian Smith and collaborators that was published in 2023.
Description
The painted parakeet is long; the nominate subspecies weighs. The sexes are the same in all subspecies. Adults of the nominate subspecies are blue from their forehead to their hindcrown that becomes deep maroon on the hindcrown and nape. They have a narrow blue collar below the nape. Their face is maroon with a ring of bare grayish skin around the eye, and their ear coverts are whitish. Their upperparts are mostly green with a dull red lower back and rump. The sides of their neck and their breast are buff with a reddish brown scalloped appearance. The center of their belly is dull red and the rest of their underparts are green. Their wing is mostly green with a red carpal area and blue primaries. Their tail is mostly maroon with a green base. Their iris is dark. Immatures are similar to adults but without the red carpal and with a whitish eye ring.The Perija parakeet resembles the painted parakeet but with a blue forecrown that becomes brown with a blue tinge on the hindcrown, a pale iris, pale gray-brown ear coverts, a dark red belly patch, and a maroon-red tail. The Subandean parakeet differs from the painted parakeet with a dull blue and red forehead, a bright maroon-red face, a buff and gray scalloped breast, a green carpal area, and a deep red tail.