12 BULLETIN 17 6, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



rado, north to the southern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, 

 south to the Gulf coast." 



This parakeet is now, doubtless, quite extinct throughout all this 

 wide range. Though formerly abundant over most of this region, 

 it had begun to disappear even in Audubon's time, for he (1842) 

 says: "Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and 

 in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, 

 scarcely any are now to be seen. At that period, they could be pro- 

 cured as far up the tributary waters of the Ohio as the Great Ken- 

 hawa, the Scioto, the heads of the Miami, the mouth of the Manimee 

 at its junction with Lake Erie, on the Illinois River, and sometimes 

 as far north-east as Lake Ontario. * * * At the present day, very 

 few are to be found higher than Cincinnati, nor is it until you reach 

 the mouth of the Ohio that Parakeets are met with in considerable 

 numbers. I should think that along the Mississippi there is not now 

 half the number that existed fifteen years ago." 



Myron H. Swenk (1934), in a comprehensive paper on this para- 

 keet of the interior, sums up its disappearance in the following 

 words: "By 1840 they were practically gone in West Virginia and 

 Ohio. They disappeared from Indiana about 1858 and from Illinois 

 about 1861. The Colorado birds were gone by about 1862. In 

 Kansas they were gone by about 1867, and during the years 1875- 

 1880 they disappeared from Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mis- 

 sissippi and Alabama. Their last stand was made in Missouri and 

 along the Arkansas Eiver and its tributaries in Arkansas and central 

 Oklahoma, but by 1890 they were practically gone in these localities 

 also. * * * The very last records of living Interior Carolina 

 Paroquets are of lone individuals shot at Atchison, Kansas, in 1904, 

 and seen at Notch, Stone County, Missouri, in 1905 {vide Widmann, 

 * * * 1907)." 



Since that time there have been at least two sight records reported. 

 Harry Harris (1919) says that "in some unaccountable manner a lone 

 bird strayed into the Courtney bottoms in 1912 and was observed 

 by Bush for several weeks before it finally disappeared." Dr. Daniel 

 S. Gage has sent me a letter from Prof. Elliot R. Downing, of the 

 University of Chicago, reporting that he saw a Carolina parakeet 

 in the sand-dune region on the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from 

 Chicago, on June 11, 1912, His letter states that he saw the parakeet 

 "on a Juneberry tree, a small one, on the margin of an interdunal 

 pond. I remember the observation very clearly. I was within 20 

 feet of the bird and had a chance to observe it with my bird glasses 

 for 10 or 15 minutes. I am therefore quite confident that there was 

 no error in the observation." 



