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Red-masked parakeet | Psittacara erythrogenys
Guayaquilaratinga | Aratinga de Guayaquil
A green parrot with a red face that flies free, and breeds, in a handful of Spanish cities. The species belongs to the dry coastal lowlands of western Ecuador and north-west Peru; the birds screeching over Valencia and Barcelona go back to escaped cage birds. In Britain and the Low Countries it amounts to no more than the occasional aviary escape.
Voice
A hard, rasping kreeh-kreeh or krrah, hoarse and with a break in it, usually in runs of three to six notes and almost always given in flight. It is deeper and coarser than the shrill screech of the Rose-ringed Parakeet, and sounds more like tearing paper than like a whistle. A flock going up produces a ragged, deafening chorus in which no two birds start together. Feeding in a crown, the birds are strikingly quiet apart from a soft yapping mutter.
Recording: Igor Lazo — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Medium-sized, solidly built green parakeet with a long, sharply tapering tail and a heavy horn-white bill. Grass-green head carrying an extensive deep red mask: forehead, lores, the area around the eye and the cheeks back beyond the eye, often running down onto chin and throat, with loose red feathers on the sides of the neck. A broad, bare, cream-white ring surrounds the eye; the iris is yellow-orange. A sharply defined red patch sits at the bend of the wing. When a bird takes off, the lesser underwing coverts flare red against the yellow-green rear half of the underwing — the strongest mark the species has. Juveniles have an entirely green head, a dark iris and almost no red on the wing; the red appears at about four months and keeps spreading for years afterwards.
Confusion species
The Mitred Parakeet is the real difficulty: as large or a little larger and heavier, also green with red on the head, and in Spain in the same parks. On that bird the red is confined to a broad band across the forehead, behind which loose red feathers are scattered over crown, cheek and neck rather than forming a closed mask; the bend of the wing is green and the underwing lacks red altogether. The Rose-ringed Parakeet is far slimmer, with a still longer and thinner tail, a red bill and no red at all on the head. Be honest about the limits of field work: young birds have not yet acquired their red, old ones carry more of it than the books suggest, and the Spanish colonies hold intermediate birds that show something of both species. A share of records therefore never gets beyond the genus.
Habitat
In Spain wholly tied to the city and its edge: parks with old, thick trees, palm-lined boulevards, the gardens of villa quarters and the tree lines along dry river beds that run straight through town. Nests in cavities — gnawed-out holes in palm trunks, crevices under eaves and in old walls. Feeds on buds, blossom, seeds and above all fruit: figs, the dates of ornamental palms, and in the arable land and market gardens around town on citrus and almond as well. Roosts communally in a fixed group of trees, the same one year after year.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
In Europe established only in Spain, with the settled core at Valencia and smaller groups in Barcelona, Madrid and a few places along the Mediterranean coast. The total runs to tens, at most a few hundred birds; there is no systematic count, and because part of the records cannot be named with certainty the figures differ from source to source. Elsewhere in Europe it means single escaped birds with no breeding. Outside Europe there are solid feral populations in California — the Telegraph Hill flock in San Francisco is the famous one — and in Hawaii and Florida. The native range covers the dry coastal lowlands of western Ecuador and north-west Peru, up to about 1,500 metres.
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In Valencia, work the trees of the drained Turia bed and the gardens around the old town in the last hour before sunset. You hear the birds before you see them: a flock screeches loudly and crosses high and fast in a straight line towards its roost. Wait until one settles and starts to feed, because only then does the head come quietly into view. Watch above all for the moment of take-off — that is the only time you see the red on the underside of the wing, and it is the one certainty the field will give you.
Conservation status
Things are not going well in the native range: the IUCN has held the species at Near Threatened since 1994, with a small and fragmented range in the Tumbes region, a shrinking population in the order of ten thousand birds and trapping for the cage-bird trade as the leading cause, alongside logging and clearance. In Europe it is an introduction founded on cage birds that escaped or were released; with import and trade now tightly restricted the supply of new birds has all but dried up, and the Spanish groups are on their own. What they do here is barely studied. As a cavity nester the species could in principle compete with native birds needing the same holes, but the numbers are so small that no measurable effect has been shown; damage to fruit stays local and limited. It is not on the Spanish Catálogo de especies exóticas invasoras, which does list the Monk and Rose-ringed Parakeets, so there is no national programme and management rests with individual councils.