S02 Field Museum of Natural History — Zoology, Vol. IX. 



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Carolina Paroquet. 



"Our paroquets 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 procured as 

 far up the tributary waters of the Ohio as the Great Kenhawa, the 

 Scioto, the heads of the Miami, the mouth of the Manimee at its junc- 

 tion with Lake Erie, on the Illinois River, and sometimes, as far east as 

 Lake Ontario and along the eastern districts as far as the boundary 

 line between Virginia and Maryland. 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 paroquets are met with in considerable num- 

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

 the number that existed fifteen years ago." 



Ridgway writes (Birds of Illinois, 1889, p. 397): "The avifauna 

 of Illinois has lost no finer or more interesting member than the pres- 

 ent species which is probably now everywhere extinct within our 

 borders, though fifty years ago it was of more or less common occur- 

 rence throughout the state. The National Museum possesses a fine 

 adult example from Illinois (Cat. No. 12272), another from Michigan, 

 and several from the Platte River in Nebraska. Now, however, it 

 appears to be quite exterminated except in isolated and rapidly con- 

 tracting areas in Florida and thence westward to the lower Mississippi 

 Valley. Its present northern limit in the interior is uncertain, but 



