Lilac-crowned Amazon (Amazona finschi) — Vorstman's Guide to the Birds of North America

Voice

A harsh, penetrating screech, loudest as a flock commutes between roost and feeding ground in morning or evening. Beyond that the species is not much of a talker; soft chatter while feeding is barely audible even close by.

Listen: SongXC804983

Recording: Manuel Grosselet — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Guadalupe Hidalgo, San Lorenzo Cacaotepec, Oaxaca, Mexico · xeno-canto

Identification

Mostly green, yellower below with a dark edge to the feathers; the forehead is maroon, ringed by a pale blue crown, nape and hindneck. The eye is amber in adults and dark brown in young birds, which also show less maroon on the forehead. The bill is horn-coloured.

Confusion species

Red-crowned Amazon (Amazona viridigenalis), with which it often flies in mixed flocks in southern California, has a bright red rather than maroon forehead and forecrown, with blue only as a stripe behind the eye instead of across the crown and nape. Smaller green parrots from the same region, such as Mitred Parakeet, have a long tail the stocky, short-tailed amazons lack.

Habitat

Dry forest with tree cavities for the nest in its native range. In southern California the small naturalised group lives in suburbs with tall old broadleaf trees, often in the same streets as Red-crowned Amazon.

Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.

Range and movements

Its original range runs along Mexico's Pacific coast, from southeastern Sonora and southwestern Chihuahua south to southern Oaxaca; that falls outside this map. In North America a small naturalised group of about a hundred birds has lived for several decades in southern California, chiefly in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County, descended from escaped and released cage birds. It does not migrate: the birds stay in the same neighbourhood all year.

Resident
Breeding (summer)
Winter
Passage
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 or national borders. Both the seasonal colour and the depth of colour come, cell by cell, 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. Every cell is counted separately for June–July, December–January and the migration months, and takes the colour of the season that wins there; a cell is only called summer or winter where the other season is nearly empty. Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Where and when to look

In a mixed group of amazons in southern California, check crown colour specifically: maroon with pale blue is this species, bright red with green is the far more numerous Red-crowned Amazon. Early in the morning, as birds leave a shared roost, both are most often seen together.

Conservation

In its native range in Mexico the species is classed as Endangered (EN); it was uplisted from Vulnerable to Endangered in 2014 because of continued illegal trapping for the cage-bird trade and the loss of some twenty per cent of its habitat. The small naturalised group in southern California falls outside that assessment and is too small to affect the world population.

Scientific name

Amazona finschi | (Sclater, 1864)

Sclater described the species in 1864; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Amazona was introduced by Lesson in 1830, a Latinised form of the name Buffon gave these parrots in the eighteenth century in the mistaken belief that they all came from the Amazon region. The epithet honours Otto Finsch, a nineteenth-century German ornithologist who published widely on parrots.