What a glorious racket it must have been. What an incredible clamor filled a Chiricahua Mountains forest one August day in 1904, when a flock of as many as 1,000 thick-billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha) descended on Bonita Canyon near Cochise Head.
These birds, one of only two parrot species native to the United States, are not the retiring kind. They chatter and call, sometimes in single, high-pitched squawks audible more than a mile away, other times with staccato bursts that many people liken to human laughter. It’s a fair bet that the miners in the area where the parrots appeared had never heard a bird make a sound like that. Nor had they seen one so exotic: brilliant green, with scarlet
across the forehead, above the eyes and on the shoulders. Boomerang-shaped yellow stripes on the underside of the parrots’ wings flashed in the forest when the birds took flight.
Even then, more than 30 years before the last Arizona sighting of wild thick-billed parrots in 1938, the birds were not common in these mountains. So the miners considered the thick-billed parrots a sign of good fortune — though that didn’t stop them from shooting several of the birds.
Now, Arizona is home to six thick-bills, all in captivity. I go to the Phoenix Zoo for a closer look at four of these federally and internationally endangered birds, whose remaining flocks are limited to high-elevation pine forests in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental range. In 2013, the population in Mexico was estimated at nearly 2,100 birds.
The zoo’s parrots have prime digs, with flyways connecting two separate enclosures, plus a couple of California condors for neighbors. Bird keeper Lisa Murphy points out that the parrots have bonded into two pairs — one still tentative, the other well established. Chattering contentedly, that second pair is beautiful to watch as the male feeds and preens his partner after she emerges from a hole in a climate-controlled nesting log.
“OK, now go back to the nest,” Murphy says to the female. Turning to me, she adds, “I looked inside with a mirror on the end of a stick. They have an egg in there.”
This is the pair’s third egg. The first was infertile; the second, they broke. Murphy says it sometimes takes a few attempts for the birds to get things right. I’m encouraged. As a wise woman once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” and the egg symbolizes that there’s still a future for a bird sometimes known as the Arizona parrot.
Although questions remain about whether thick-billed parrots were sporadic or permanent residents of Arizona, their history here reaches deep into the Southwest’s past. Along with the remains of macaws brought in from Mexico and Central America, thick-billed parrot skeletons dating to as early as A.D. 1125 were found at Wupatki Pueblo, where the birds were used for ceremonial purposes. The birds also appear on Mimbres ceramics from New Mexico, and there’s a Parrot Clan in Hopi society, while the Kyaro Katsina is a parrot-like figure associated with rain.
The first documented sighting of what likely were thick-billed parrots dates to May 1583, when Antonio de Espejo’s expedition — which explored the Rio Grande and the Verde Valley, among other Southwestern areas — described parrots by a river “surrounded by an abundance of grape-vines, many walnut and other trees.” This reference is notable for both its early date and its northerly location outside present-day Flagstaff, where the parrots have never been spotted since.
An encounter with thick-bills was not just another bird sighting. In 1900, ornithologist Richard Lusk described a flock of the parrots “scolding and chattering and calling in a language which was neither English nor Spanish, but may have been some Indian tongue, or, indeed, that of the old Aztecs of Mexico themselves.”
As their mountain-forest habitat suggests, thick-bills defy assumptions about parrots as tropical, jungle-dwelling birds. For their primary food source, the parrots rely on pine seeds, especially those from Chihuahua pines, trees that reach the northern extent of their range in Southeastern Arizona. The parrots hold and rotate the cones in one claw, systematically tearing off the scales with their bills to get at the seeds. It’s a tricky enough maneuver that young parrots have to learn the technique from their parents before fledging at about 5 months.
Muscular and built like falcons, thick-bills are dynamic, agile flyers. During breeding season, they can cover 100 miles or more a day in search of food, flying to foraging areas 15 to
20 miles from their nests several times. And they execute acrobatic diving moves to avoid peregrine falcons, northern goshawks and other winged predators.
“They’re much faster in flight than hawks. A little edge, and the hawks can’t get them,” says Noel Snyder, a retired wildlife biologist who helped direct the thick-bill release program that began in the 1980s. He lives in Portal and is also the author of a book about the extinct Carolina parakeets, the U.S. parrot species last credibly sighted in the 1930s. “Thick-bills are very social birds, so with more eyes, the hawks can’t sneak up on them as easily,” Snyder says. “The parrots habitually post sentinels. There’s almost always one individual up top in the trees, looking around.”
The thick-bills’ range includes altitudes of nearly 12,000 feet. They’re one of the world’s northernmost and highest-elevation parrot species, which has earned them a seemingly contradictory nickname: “snow parrots.”
In one account from the early 1900s, a rancher and mine owner wrote: “They would fly to a snow-covered limb, turn over, and grab the underside with their feet, woodpecker fashion, pulling themselves along with their bill after the acorns, and occasionally dropping into the snow after those that fell. Wading in the snow with their short legs, and solemn appearance, was very ludicrous, and gave us several laughs. The poor buggers were having such tough sledding, that I hadn’t the heart to kill them.”
That author was one of the few. By most accounts, hunting, not habitat loss, decimated the thick-billed parrot population in Arizona.
In fairness to prospectors and others living and working in remote areas, the birds offered an easy subsistence food source. But farmers erroneously believed that the parrots ate crops and fruit in orchards. Still others shot thick-bills for novel trophies. So, along with the wonder at the parrots’ sudden appearance came the cold calculus of slaughter. During one incident at Pinery Canyon in the winter of 1917 and ’18, as many as 100 parrots were shot out of a flock of 300 — virtually all of them for taxidermy or skins.
Between 1986 and 1993, the Arizona Game and Fish Department, in conjunction with the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, attempted to reintroduce the parrots into the Chiricahuas. The effort was based primarily on wild-caught birds that entered the illegal bird trade and were later confiscated from smugglers and aviculturists, but parrots bred in captivity were also used. The agencies hoped to establish a separate population from flocks in Mexico, which were considered vulnerable to habitat loss by logging and fire. According to the conservation group BirdLife International, less than 1 percent of the Sierra Madre’s old-growth forests survive.
The thick-bills’ range includes altitudes of nearly 12,000 feet. They’re one of the world’s northernmost and highest-elevation parrot species, which has earned them a seemingly contradictory nickname: “snow parrots.”
Snyder says that after decades free of logging, the forests of the Chiricahuas, though not pristine, presented promising habitat. But a combination of factors doomed the effort, which some likened to a federal feeding program for hawks.
The situation was more complicated than that, Snyder says. The captive-bred parrots had a high mortality rate, but the confiscated wild-caught parrots performed fairly well, flocking, nesting and eating pine cones as expected. But Snyder calls those birds’ survival rates “not fully adequate,” and at first, researchers attributed the losses to predation by hawks. Later, though, they discovered many of the confiscated parrots were sick.“The hawks actually took a lot of parrots that were going to die anyway, birds that were failing and straggling from flocks. And if you have a straggler, boy, the hawks really go for them,” he says. “Those confiscated birds may have looked healthy in captivity but had been exposed to disease.”
Then, drought conditions in the late 1980s decimated the released parrots’ food supply. “We learned two lessons,” Snyder says. “Don’t use questionable birds, and don’t do releases unless you’re confident that the habitat will be good for the birds.”
According to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2013 addendum to its recovery plan for the parrots, conservation efforts are now focusing on the population in the Sierra Madre, where the Mexican government is trying to protect key breeding areas. Others, including the organization Defenders of Wildlife, have argued that the species’ long-term survival strategy should also involve re-establishing the parrots in Arizona. And Chris Biro, a parrot trainer and onetime resident of Portal who founded the organization Bird Recovery International, has sought permission to breed thick-bills and eventually establish a population in the state.
“I’m an optimist about the overall conservation of thick-billed parrots,” Snyder says. “But I’m also not sure it makes sense to reinitiate more releases here. We would have to subtract birds from Mexico, and while I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to someday see parrots in Arizona, it’s not the real conservation question. There are three preserves established in Mexico with major breeding colonies.” He also notes that wildfires in Southeastern Arizona have impacted many of the area’s pine-forest habitats.
It may be more a romantic notion than an environmental reality, but some way, somehow, I’d love to one day hike in the Chiricahuas or Huachucas and suddenly see a flock of thick-billed parrots swoop into the pines.
I’m not the only one. When I go to see the thick-bill pair at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Shawnee Riplog-Peterson, the museum’s curator of mammalogy and ornithology, also muses about that almost mystical experience. “What would it be like?” she wonders. “The sound. The color. Just to be able to see something like that. And then, all of a sudden, they disappear in the trees. If they don’t make a sound, you’d never see them. You could be staring right at them and never see anything. And these parrots are big, gorgeous, colorful birds.”