Green Quaker Parrot

Description

This is a beautiful green Quaker parrot also known as the Monk Parakeet.

The monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus), also known as the Quaker parrot, is a species of true parrot in the family Psittacidae. It is a small, bright-green parrot with a greyish breast and greenish-yellow abdomen. Its average lifespan is 20–30 years. It originates from the temperate to subtropical areas of Argentina and the surrounding countries in South America. Self-sustaining feral populations occur in many places, mainly in North America and Europe.

The monk parakeet was described by French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D’Histoire Naturelle, which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon’s text.Neither the plate caption nor Buffon’s description included a scientific name, but in 1783, Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Psittacus monachus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. As Buffon did not specify the origin of his specimen, in 1937 the American ornithologist James Peters assigned the type location as Montevideo, Uruguay. The monk parakeet is now placed in the genus Myiopsitta that was introduced by French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1854.The genus name combines the Ancient Greek mus, muos meaning “mouse” and the New Latin psitta meaning “parrot”, alluding to the mouse-grey face and underparts. The specific epithet monachus is Late Latin for a “monk”.