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Regent Parrot | Polytelis anthopeplus

Regentparkiet | Perico regente

The Regent Parrot is the large yellow parrot of the mallee and the south-western woodlands: slim, with back-swept wings and a long, dark, tapering tail. The male is almost entirely deep yellow, with blue-black flight feathers and tail and a red patch in the middle of the wing; the female is olive-green. It breeds in hollows of old River Red Gums and will fly ten to twenty kilometres from there to its feeding ground.

Regent Parrot (Polytelis anthopeplus) — Photo: Peripitus — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Voice

The call is a loud, harsh carrak, carrak that on a clear day is heard well before the birds come into view, and it is usually how the species is picked up over the river forest. Feeding birds twitter softly and continuously between seeds. At the nest tree come short, low throaty notes, and a disturbed bird screeches sharply and repeatedly as it leaves.

No freely licensed recording has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.

Identification

A slim parrot of nearly forty centimetres with a long, dark, tapering tail and back-swept wings. The male is deep golden yellow on head, neck and underparts, with an olive-yellow back, a large yellow shoulder patch and a bright red patch across the median wing coverts; flight feathers and tail are blue-black. The bill is deep red to pink, the iris orange-red. Female and young birds are olive to grey-green, with a dull red rather than bright red wing patch and pink edges to the undertail feathers. In flight the contrast between the pale body and the black wingtips and tail carries a long way.

Confusion species

Superb Parrot (Polytelis swainsonii) has exactly the same slim silhouette but is grass green, with a yellow face and a red band across the breast and no red wing patch; the two ranges meet along the Murray. Princess Parrot (Polytelis alexandrae) is pastel, with a pink throat, and lives far out in the desert interior. A female Regent Parrot is told from a female Superb Parrot by the dull red wing patch, which the latter lacks. Australian Ringneck (Barnardius zonarius) shares the yellow belly but has a black head with a yellow nape ring and a broad tail, and flies in short undulations.

Habitat

In the east it nests in river forest of old River Red Gums along the Murray and flies up to twenty kilometres out into the mallee to feed; in the south-west it uses open forest and woodland of Salmon Gum and Wandoo and forages in the wheatbelt croplands. The nest is in a hollow branch or a hole in a large old or dead tree, usually near water. It eats seeds of grasses and herbs and cereal grain — wheat above all — together with buds, blossom and insect larvae, partly on the ground and partly in the canopy.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.

Range and movements

Two separate areas in southern Australia, both inside this map frame. The eastern one lies around the Murray valley: south-western New South Wales, north-western Victoria, and the Murray Mallee and Riverland of South Australia. The western one covers south-western Western Australia, from the wheatbelt out towards Esperance, where the bird is distinctly more numerous. Between the two lies a gap of more than a thousand kilometres. It does not occur in New Zealand.

Resident
dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

The map is a density field, not a drawn range boundary: it is built from the records themselves and therefore does not follow state borders. The seasonal colour comes from the arrangement per state, the depth of colour from the records of GBIF (2006-2026), counted per 0,7° cell and divided by all bird records in that same cell, so that the density of birdwatchers does not count. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

Take up position early in the morning at a line of old River Red Gums along the Murray, in the Riverland for instance, and wait for the birds commuting from the nesting forest to the feeding ground: they fly high and straight and give themselves away with the harsh carrak. In low light the male's yellow shows against dark forest from a great distance. On birds feeding on the ground, the red wing patch is the quickest usable mark.

Conservation

Least Concern (LC) on the world list, thanks to the numerous western population. The eastern subspecies of the Murray valley is in far worse shape: it is listed as Vulnerable nationally, Endangered in New South Wales and Vulnerable in Victoria. The problem is that nesting forest and feeding ground lie apart and both have been damaged: the old River Red Gums are dying under the altered water regime of the Murray and are not being replaced, while much of the mallee behind them has been cleared for cropland. Add nest robbing for the bird trade and, in the wheatbelt, persecution as a crop pest.

Scientific name

Polytelis anthopeplus | (Lear, 1831)

Lear described the species in 1831 as Palaeornis anthopeplus, on plate 29 of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae; because it later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Polytelis was introduced by Wagler in 1832, from the Greek polytelēs, 'costly'. The epithet anthopeplus is built from the Greek anthos, 'flower', and peplos, 'robe' — the bird in a robe of flowers. The original description gives no locality; it was later fixed on New South Wales.