In a message to Rich Veraa, Elvis Hargrove wrote:
EH>  ..... We're contiguous, (Sort of) to Mexico and there's sure plenty
EH> of WILD parrots down THERE!  I think it's strange that Florida HAD
EH> no parrots
We had Conuropsis carolinensis.. they ranged from Florida to 
Virginia/Maryland, and at one time were the most numerous birds around -- but 
were all shot as pests in the nineteenth century (as most of the thickbills 
were in the midwest).
 and that the Lower Rio Grande Valley MUST have had at
EH> least some misfits and malcontents!  (The two parts of th
EH> country being so similar in most other respects.)
EH> Rich, I just don't think that all the parrots we see here along the
EH> river are feral.  Some distinctly are.  Anything with a big yellow
EH> splash on it's head almost certainly is, but there's CLOUDS of
EH> parrots 50-100 miles south of us that look JUST like the ones we
EH> have locally. 
I hunted around in the library for bird books and found zilch.  At one time I 
had the big encyclopedic _Parrots of the World_ but it got "borrowed" so I 
have to go from memory.  But as I recall, they didn't list any parrots -- 
other than mirgatory thickbills -- as native to Mexico north of Yucatan. I'm 
guessing that that was based on surveys in the early 20th century, but might 
have been even earlier than that.  When I read that, I didn't think about it, 
but remember talking to Shubot about the distribution of north American 
parrots, and apparently that distribution is still widely accepted as 
"current."
What I suspect happened is that as thickbills, which used to number in tens 
or hundreds of thousands, and migrated from central Mexico to Illinois, 
became near-extinct, other species -- mostly varieties of Amazon, I guess
-- bagan moving north to fill in the thickbill's vacant niche.
Prolly the thing to do would be to get a university ornithology department 
interested in re-mapping the distribution of them.  I know the state of 
Arizona has been spending a lot on a project to re-establish a thickbill 
population.
       Cheers,
           Rich
http://www.netside.net/~rveraa/
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