THE BIRDS OF HAITI AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 211 



Resident; common in many localities particularly in the interior. 



The parrot is a common captive in Hispaniolan households where 

 it often lives in a state of semi-freedom in houses, patios, and shade 

 trees. It is docile when captured young, learns to speak words of 

 human speech readily, and is exported in small number to nearby 

 islands or to the United States. Though locally common in the 

 settled lowlands it is reduced from its early abundance and is en- 

 countered in numbers at present only in the forests of the interior 

 mountains. Where it is found it is a conspicuous member of the 

 avifauna as though it feeds concealed among the leaves of trees it 

 makes daily flights in screeching flocks above the forests. 



The species has long been considered a game bird. Jefferys in 1760 

 related that the Indians were said to send a boy into a tree with a 

 captive parrot on his head which he caused to scream. Wild birds 

 attracted by this gathered about squalling excitedly and were noosed 

 skilfully one by one and killed. Moreau de Saint-Mery says that 

 parrots were numerous in his day and excellent for the table, but 

 Baron Wimpffen in 1817 found them shy so that it was "almost 

 impossible to get a shot." Salle says they were good to eat and 

 natives still consider them game. 



Cherrie relates that he saw several flocks of parrots containing as 

 many as five hundred birds, and that the birds were watchful so that 

 they were approached with difficulty. Beck, near the base of Loma 

 Tina, observed that they ate the seeds of ripe sour oranges. Wetmore 

 found a flock near San Juan, May 1, 1927, but there are compara- 

 tively few modern records in the southern section of the Dominican 

 Republic. Hartert observed this bird at Sanchez in 1892, and 

 Christy records it in that section as found at every turn. He 

 observed it nesting in holes in the palm trees. Abbott records a 

 nest at Laguna on the Samana Peninsula, that on March 5, 1919, 

 contained two young covered with pin feathers. The nest was in a 

 hollow about nine inches in diameter in a half dead vervain tree 

 that stood in a clearing a hundred yards from a house and the same 

 distance from woodland. The trunk of this tree was hollow for 

 most of its length with the lower part filled with wet debris. The 

 entrance hole was twenty-seven feet above the ground. On May 

 28, 1919 his boy, John King, secured an addled egg from a hollow 

 in a palm twenty feet from the ground. This egg is white, stained 

 to a dull color by age. It measures approximately 35.7 mm. long 

 (one end being damaged) by 27.6 mm. wide. Kaempfer recorded 

 parrots as breeding in the lowlands in April. He says that they 

 are destructive to maize and the cultivated legume called gonduro, 

 a complaint made almost universally of Amazon parrots throughout 

 the range of the genus. Cory secured skins at Samana March 23, 



