Sydney Porter—Notes on the Cyanorhamphus Parrakeets 307



Fifty or more years ago it was very occasionally imported into this

country, but was never bred here, although there is a record of some

young ones being reared in France in 1883. This unobtrusive little

bird seems to have been known but for a few years, twenty or thirty

at the most, and to have passed on, regretted only by those of us who

deplore the wanton and wasteful destruction of Nature’s most finished

products. At the present rate another two or three hundred years

will see the end of nearly all feathered life on this globe of ours, unless

Man providentially manages, with the aid of poison gas, etc., to exter¬

minate himself.


Looking through much literature I have been unable to find anything

concerning this bird in captivity, and no one I met in New Zealand

had either kept it or seen it alive, so its history now appears to be a

closed book.


The Society Island Parrakeet [Cyanorhamphus nealandicus )


Only three species of the Cyanoramphus Parrakeets were found in

islands lying within the tropics and far from the typical habitat of

this group of birds. The Society Islands are a group of small and

remote islands lying almost midway between Australia and South

America. The species was first made known by Captain Cook, who

first visited the island in the eighteenth century. Not long after the

settling in the islands of the white traders the Parrakeet commenced

to disappear and nearly fifty years ago it was reported as extinct,

only two specimens being known. It was one of the few Parrakeets

in this family which had a juvenile plumage.


The adult bird differed rather from most of the family. In colour,

the forehead was black, a stripe through the eye and also the rump

feathers being scarlet, the flight feathers blue and the rest of the body

a bright green.


The Ulietea Island Parrakeet [Cyanorhamphus ulietanus)


Like the last-mentioned Parrakeet, this species is also extinct.

It was confined to one small island in the Society Group and was

reported extinct over a hundred years ago. This bird differed from all

the other members of the family by having the plumage an olive brown



