Parakeet Dreams (unedited first draft)

The recent news on so-called "de-extinction" inspired me to consider what true de-extinction would actually look like, especially for scientists who study the ecology and conservation of at-risk species. I had a good time speculating (on BlueSky) about a hypothetical fantasy story chronically the rediscovery of spontaneously and mysteriously de-extinct Carolina Parakeets (a species native to eastern North America which was declared extinct in the 1930s). That inspired me to actually write a short piece imagining what the (completely made-up!) rediscovery of the species would do to a scientist. Here is the first draft of that piece. Please remember I am neither a fantasy nor a creative writer, this is just for fun and I would love to see more sophisticated takes on the topic! I have since submitted this story for a magazine with some edits, so this is the first (unedited, unpublished) draft and you may see a better version come out later (fingers crossed!). Cheers, SK

[parakeet image photo from Huub Veldhuijzen van Zanten/Naturalis Biodiversity Center, CC BY-SA 3.0, link in reference section below post]

Parakeet Dreams

The bird was hunched, its glassy eyes a little crooked, a hint of dust clinging to its fading red face feathers, green wings slightly askew. It wasn’t the most immaculate specimen, but I still smiled very fondly at it, as I always did when I took a break from my dark office and stalked up to the exhibits to clear my head.

Suddenly a tiny hand, sticky with a concoction of toddler saliva and half-chewed fruit snacks, landed on the glass in front of the bird with a soft thwak. My instinct was always an initial selfish dismay (the poor janitorial staff!) before that little self-correcting internal voice reminded me “this is the point of museums, is it not?”

“Parrot!” the child announced matter-of-factly and her mother smiled, prompting conversation with “it is a parrot! Just like our Archie! Do you think it would also sing with us?”

I was not made to be a museum docent, which is why they lock me in the collections downstairs while the gentle trained educators upstairs do their good work. My anxiety always gets the best of me; do I swoop in to share hot bird facts like a stuffy know-it-all? Should I just lean into it and get a tweed jacket with some patched up sleeves? But below my actual sleeves (sun-faded hoodie, my specialty) I felt my skin crawl across my tattoo, a likeness of this very same bird but with brilliant feathers gleaming in the sun and eyes bright with life. The words came out of me before I could stop them: “Where do you think this parrot lived?”

The toddler scrunched her face into a comically exaggerated “I’m thinking!” expression for the briefest of seconds (perhaps she had watched cartoon characters pondering?) before she declared “rainforest, with Blu and Jewel.” Her mother must have assumed I do not watch children’s cartoons, so she quickly intervened with “we just watched that old movie Rio, with the endangered parrots.” I smiled, “Oh that is a good one, isn’t it?” grateful for the save (I’d been meaning to watch it, since the movie was about bird conservation and my beloved parrots, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it all these years later). “But this parrot actually lived right here, where we live!” I added.

The child’s mother quickly glanced over my shoulder towards the window, as if wondering how a green, yellow, and red parrot could possibly live in the forested temperate hills of luscious Cincinnati, Ohio, but the child had more pressing questions. “Do bad guys catch these parrots too?” she asked, suddenly concerned.

Now I was kicking myself; this is why I am not cut out to be a docent. What do you say to a child, imagining the woes of animated parrots and her own pet, about the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet? Do I explain how these colorful gregarious birds had once traveled the landscape in flocks of hundreds of individuals, making the bottomland swamps of the Eastern United States look surprisingly tropical? That they were social, perhaps even sharing nests together, living in vibrant parakeet communities like those we still observe in living species? That when colonial settlers were anxious about the birds’ tendency to descend on their orchard fruits and shot them, the rest of the flock would return to their fallen kin, easy targets for settlers trying to eradicate them? That their colorful feathers had been coveted for decorations on fancy hats before the formation of citizen bird conservation networks put an end to that wing of the millinery trade? That the very development that gave rise to our home city had also eliminated the forests that these birds relied on? That the very last one, a male named Incas, had died in 1918 in this very city, in the same small pagoda that had housed the last Passenger Pigeon before she died in 1914?

I decided on “People did capture these ones to sell as pets too, but they are gone now.” A sticky hand twacked on the glass again, a bit more gently this time. “Maybe they’ll come back” she offered. I tried my best to offer a gentle smile and said “maybe you are right.” There would be a time to learn that extinction was forever and that the Carolina Parakeets would never again fly over the skies of Cincinnati, but it didn’t have to be today.

In my office that evening I reflected on the interaction a bit more. It had been almost 120 years since Incas had died, the very last of his species known to science. When he died, possibly due to unseasonably cold weather or depression after his mate had perished, his body was intended to go to the Smithsonian but had been misplaced somehow. I guess in the middle of the first World War the researchers had more pressing concerns. Perhaps they did not truly grasp that the species was gone forever; it would be another 21 years for the species to be formally declared extinct. Incas may not have been the last one; rumors existed of individuals holding on in the Florida swamps until the 1920s. Locals in Georgia claimed to get footage of some there even decades after that, but they were likely escaped parakeets of other species. I wish we knew where Incas was. To this day people claim he may be tucked away in this very museum, but Lord knows I’ve looked for him with no luck.

My parents think it is funny that I have published research on a bird species that disappeared over a century ago. They tell their friends that makes me a paleontologist, “Ellie Satler but for parrots.” It is a good joke, but of course it was only that one paper. I had been inspired by my colleagues who had used historical data to argue that the two subspecies of Carolina Parakeets had gone extinct almost 30 years apart, perhaps living in the wild much later than Incas had. I had been curious about the known variation between the subspecies, so I’d explored museum specimens and published a short side-project on phenotypic variation in Carolina Parakeets. Nothing very newsworthy, but it made the Jurassic Park jokes work I guess.

The truth is that despite working in a museum, in an office surrounded by drawers of long-dead birds, most of my efforts were focused on the birds still living. Using museum specimens to study the slight differences between bird individuals living in different regions, assessing the role of genetic and environmental variation in phenotypic development. Cataloguing whole genomes of bird species to explore cryptic species: birds that might look the same but actually have substantial hidden genetic variation that indicates they last shared a common ancestor millennia ago. Carefully assessing the chemicals trapped in feather samples to show how exposure to environmental contaminates changes over space and time. Using ratios of different weights of nitrogen (“stable isotopes”) to gather clues about dead birds’ migration routes and diets. Gathering swabs from newly-arrived specimens to explore symbiotic relationships between the birds and the bacteria that live in their guts. The more I can learn about current birds the more I could try to prevent the disaster that befell the Carolina Parakeet—one out of every four individual birds had been lost in the last 70 years, and my work is part of the effort to stop it. That is what I tell myself anyway, when I’m working late nights in the museum basement.

That’s where I find myself this evening. As usual, I’m suffering from my poor time management. How is it already 7:30 PM? I still need to answer some emails from the volunteers who are collecting dead birds in town. They get up super early to walk below windows, looking for poor migrating birds who flew down to the city, confused by the lights at night that seem like the stars and moon that they use to navigate. Once in the city they are exhausted and frightened and bash into windows. Volunteers bring me their fragile little bodies; the ones in good condition will make it into the collection, and we may be able to gather important data from the rest. It is very good work and I am happy I do not have to do it myself (I am not a morning person, ironic given my “Ornithologist” job description). I need to answer these emails.

I’m mid-sentence when I hear the “ding” of a Facebook notification. Ever one for a distraction, I glance at it (why do I keep the notifications on?). It is a private message from an old grad school colleague: “Hey parrot nerd, seen this one yet?” accompanied by a crying-laughing emoji and a forwarded post from the “What’s the bird?” forum. Intrigued and always down to keep myself in the office even later, I take a look. In the post a person asks for help with an identification, dutifully listing their location (somewhere in Louisiana) and yesterday’s date. Their post includes a pixelated over-cropped cell phone photo of what appears to be a feeder at the edge of a small wetland. Hanging on that feeder is (unmistakably, despite the pixelation) a parrot. Green wings gleaming with that soft shimmer that only structural colors can make, head dabbed in yellow and red bright pigments. No parrot species routinely occur in Louisiana, but pet parrots escape (or are dumped by neglectful owners) relatively frequently. It always gives me a jolt in the stomach; the poor owners are probably so distraught, the parrots so confused. Sun conures and Jenday conures are both green like this bird, but I would expect the yellow and red colors to extend down the front of their body. The bird in the photo only had those colors on the head. The tattoo under my sleeve tingled again; it sure looked like the Carolina Parakeet upstairs. I clicked on the comments. The first few were predictable (“an escaped pet?” and “I plugged the photos into the free app Merlin, it said Sun Conure”), but I quickly found comments that mirrored my suspicions: “Looks like an AI photo of a Carolina Parakeet” and “Little too late for an April Fool’s joke.” I replied to my colleague “good one lol!” and went back to my emails.

I was quite busy the next day, and the day after. Tours for school kids, photographing some samples to send to colleagues, working on a manuscript in my spare time (read: after work hours). I was surprised when I logged back onto Facebook and saw that the photo was still up, now with hundreds of comments and a clarification from the original poster that it was not a joke nor AI (they were being hounded by internet sleuths, demanding metadata and more proof). I groaned—was this about to become “a thing”? Every time a unique individual bird generates enough buzz on birding groups it breaks containment and spills over to the local press and non-birder circles. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is always delightful to see birds in the news, but when it happens I typically get those articles forwarded to me by every single connection I have on social media. When a yellow cardinal (a Northern Cardinal with a pigment abnormality rendering him yellow instead of red) was photographed in the 2010s I swear I heard the news from over a hundred different people. It became such a joke among my peers that we framed photos of the bird for our office and made “Have you seen the yellow cardinal?” t-shirts. People knew I liked parrots, especially Carolina Parakeets, so no doubt I would be explaining for weeks (months?) that extinct birds are permanently extinct and do not just magically appear in a suburban yard in Louisiana. I tried to ignore it.

The next morning I woke up bright and (too) early. As I took my dog out, bleary-eyed and needing my morning caffeine, I checked my phone, only to be jolted wide-awake by the angry red bubble showing that I had somehow accumulated dozens of emails in the six hours I was unconscious. Assuming the worst (had the museum flooded? was our funding axed?) I scanned my inbox, only to groan once again when I saw subject lines like “Carolina Parakeet in Louisiana?” and “Parrot photos” and “Georgia parakeets” and… wait a minute, Georgia? They probably meant Louisiana and muddled the states, right? I clicked the email but as I waited for it to load (that’s on me for stepping just out-of-range of my home WIFI signal) I noticed it was from a colleague in Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division. Surely she wouldn’t have confused the states? The email text loaded before the photos did: “UM WTF ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THESE PHOTOS I JUST GOT” (appropriately professional email to send over your work address, I chuckled to myself), but then the photos loaded and I understood the all-caps enthusiasm. There they were, clear as day, reflected over the swamp water in a manner I am not sure AI could readily pull off: an entire flock of Carolina Parakeets, six individuals in total. No longer the haunted awkward poses imagined by Audubon in his famous painting (he often painted dead birds, strung up to look alive) but startlingly alive, more colorful than the faded specimens would have you imagine. Living Carolina Parakeets? It couldn’t be, of course. Extinction is forever, everyone knows that. It had to be an elaborate dupe. I immediately felt a little annoyed at my friend; she was a wildlife professional, surely she should know better?

I started to read through the rest of the emails. Each one had photos of purported “Carolina Parakeets,” in varying flock sizes and with a diversity of photographic quality. I started getting angry then, even triple-checked that it was not, in fact, April Fools Day (alas, it was now May). Disgruntled, I stomped back into my house and started getting ready for work, feeling a little woozier than I should have.

As I flopped down on my couch to drink some coffee I noticed even more emails flooding into my inbox (why did I have to live in the era of emails?). Then my phone rang and I may have actually shouted in frustration (I’m not great with calls before the caffeine kicks in). It was a dear friend and a local birder, the kind you can trust to always be out looking for birds even when the fair weather birders have gone. “Hey Alex, what’s up?” I said as I answered the phone, trying very hard to sound like the kind of person who did not just shriek at a cell phone ringer. “Happy you picked up, no one else has” he said, “I need you to get to Ellis Lake Wetlands right now.” I was immediately alarmed and guilty at myself for being annoyed, was he experiencing an emergency? “Are you okay?” I asked. “More than okay” he replied, “I’m currently looking at a flock of Carolina Parakeets.”

I admit I was still annoyed on the drive there, perhaps because my coffee still hadn’t really kicked in, and I was presumably going to be late for work. But despite every logical part of my brain shouting otherwise, I was actually starting to wonder whether there were actually some parakeets in a swamp in Cincinnati, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee… I trusted Alex, he was a great birder, why would he lie? I was not driving as carefully as I should have and drifted across the line as I scanned the trees along the highway. A nearby car honked at me; surely if I were dreaming that would have startled me awake, right?

By the time I swerved into the parking lot, tires squealing, it was already starting to fill with birders, more than you would expect on a work day. Some were actually running, binoculars and cameras clutched awkwardly to their chests, headed for the water. I didn’t run (not my style) but I did walk fast enough I was out of breath by the time I made it to the dozen or so people clamoring at the water’s edge, all staring at a flock of… Carolina Parakeets.

“Not Carolina Parakeets” I told myself sternly, “they are gone. So, what are these?” The birds were foraging together, squawking happily as they explored the trees standing above the water. I had to admit their calls sure sounded like the descriptions. Their tails were longer than I would expect for a conure. Their colors seemed just right. I could feel my brain getting frantic, racing through all the memories I had of other parrot species like I was flipping through a field guide. The more possibilities I eliminated the harder I found it to take a breath. I could suddenly hear the roaring in my ears that I had learned long ago signaled a sudden drop in blood pressure and my vision started to narrow. Knees shaking, I staggered back a few steps until I was out of the way, then I dropped down to a seated position on the ground. I started walking myself through deep breathing exercises, never taking my eyes off the flock of parakeets gaily dancing around in the early morning sun. When my hands had stopped shaking so bad I couldn’t hold my binoculars I reached for my phone and started to make some calls.

Within a few days it would become apparent that I was not the only ornithologist who had called their colleagues that morning. Across the eastern United States teams of bird researchers had cancelled meetings, abandoned their classes, and rushed out to the local swampy woods to collect more information on the sudden flocks of parakeets that had appeared there (one colleague even delayed his wedding, he was too busy collecting fecal samples from parakeets in Missouri). Research fund use restrictions were bent slightly and IACUC permits were hurriedly amended to include non-invasive sampling of dropped feathers and measurements of wild-caught (and released) birds. A collaborative team from the University of Illinois worked around the clock and somehow already had a preprint up with evidence of what we already had all expected: the genotypes of the newly arrived parakeets sure looked similar to the genotypes of our museum specimens. Of Carolina Parakeets. An extinct species.

Full genome sequencing data were on their way and the list of coauthors on the paper was going to be astoundingly long by the time it made it through peer-review. Behavioral ethograms were suggesting the birds were behaving like the extinct species and a team in Alabama had already located a nest cavity with eggs. Of Carolina Parakeets. An extinct species.

I spent those weeks in a daze, worse than even the darkest days of burnout when I had been writing my PhD dissertation. I couldn’t sleep or calm down enough to eat. The press was having a field day of course; who wouldn’t want the amazing news of an apparent resurrected species, an as-of-yet unexplained de-extinction event? My phone was ringing so often I had to keep it on silence just to think straight but my inbox was filling up. I took vacation time so I could work at home; there were so many people knocking on my office door to say “I bet you are so happy!” that I could not get a minute’s peace. As the days went on it slowly sunk in that a dream certainly wouldn’t last this long. I kept feeling my heart beating in my arm, deliriously wondering “maybe I’m dead? That makes more sense than a spontaneous de-extinction?”

My therapist knows me too well, after years of treating my chronic anxiety she knew better than to start with “you must be delighted!” Instead she let me ramble through all my chaotic thoughts, nodding along as I monologued for the entire session (she is used to this, she probably knows enough about my work to have a PhD in biology by this point). Birds cannot just appear out of thin air, so where had they come from? For years now pseudoscientific companies had been spending millions of megadonor dollars to genetically modify current living species, tweaking a few genes to alter phenotypes and declaring them a de-extinct version of some charismatic extinct species. But if that were the case, how did they manage to so accurately replicate the genotypes of a Carolina Parakeet, and its behavioral phenotypes too? That is a level of sophistication we have never seen from these ventures so far (and likely will never see). Even if they did pull it off, how did they manage to release tens of thousands of birds (if eBird reports are to be believed) with no one noticing, birds so readily acclimated to their local environments that they are already raising offspring there? And why is no one taking the credit for it?

After the “how??” questions, which at this point are completely unresolved, I get to the “now what?” The birds are already adored by birders and the media, so I am not expecting there to be an issue getting them protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that protects birds and their nests across the continent. While there have been scattered reports of people trying to grab the birds, they are quickly confronted by birders who have descended on the eastern United States from around the globe. The original parakeets had been driven to extinction by the millinery trade (no longer an issue, dead bird hats are not in fashion and are illegal), habitat loss (still an ongoing issue for all birds), and their persecution by farmers protecting their crops. Will the good press and decades of environmental conservation work protect them this time around?

My next fears are less immediate. Will these newly arrived parakeets have a negative impact on the threatened birds and ecosystems that were already struggling in the years before the magical reappearance? Hollow trees are not that easy to come by these days, will they out-compete other cavity nesters for this space? Of course, volunteers around the country are constructing nest boxes for them to mimic hollow trees, but will they use them? Will there be enough? Will they find the correct food sources or over-graze native plants? Are they immune to modern pathogens or could we lose them as quickly as we gained them to some parasite, fungus, bacteria, or virus? Parrots are notoriously smart and curious; would that lead to human-wildlife conflict as they explore our neighborhoods, picking at electronics and getting into trash cans?

Then I get existential. If this species suddenly reappeared, could we see it happen to other species? What about those that hadn’t only disappeared a century ago, could we suddenly see animals reappearing that are not particularly suited to our Anthropocene? The press is already wildly speculating about mammoths, megalodons, dinosaurs, dire wolves (real ones), and more, dubious reports of every extinct species under the sun have been flooding forums, tabloids, and daytime talk shows. Even if no other species are magically reincarnated, what will this do to our conservation efforts? The “de-extinction” companies have already given lawmakers an excuse to relax protections for endangered species and to do away with regulations limiting the exploitation of the environment, as if we no longer need to care about endangered wildlife because some tech bros will make replacements for us. Will we no longer fund conservation efforts because species just appear on their own, or will the sudden interest in extinction be a science communication opportunity that reinvigorates environmental movements?

By the end of the session I’m just muttering “but still… how? How are they here? What does this mean?” My therapist just looks at me, concerned, and reminds me to pay my copay. Even without any answers it feels a bit better to have said it all out loud.

I spend many hours in Zoom calls, Teams calls, phone calls, email chains, text chains, Signal chains… as new data come in we all want to start addressing these questions. Much of the initial news is…promising, if still a little confusing. The parakeets seem to gleefully take to the nest boxes that volunteers are providing and there are even reports of birds starting to nest on human structures like Monk Parakeets do. While the birds are already finding blossoms in orchards, which will damage fruit crops, entrepreneurial farmers are charging curious onlookers for tours of the property and marketing “parakeet-endorsed” fruit products in their shops. Hobbyists have found that the birds enjoy feeders; Wild Birds Unlimited has been in the news because all their bird feeders are on backorder. Multiple towns have already announced Parakeet Festivals, with hastily-arranged potlucks and 5K races and costume contests. Local parks are coordinating with nearby businesses to arrange overflow parking, as their lots cannot hold all the visitors, and donors are paying for additional hired seasonal workers to keep visitors from trampling sensitive habitats. Every time I go on social media I see so many pictures of happy people and happy parakeets. It is funny, though—I’m so busy I mostly only see the parakeets in photos, I never get outside myself.

When I do manage to find time to get out to the parks and watch them it still feels surreal. I wish I could say I was as ecstatic as the crowds are, or even as delighted as my colleagues. Honestly I just feel numb. I watch them, the parakeets of my dreams, and my vision unfocuses, rendering their brilliant colors into the dull colors of a faded museum specimen as I instead ponder their existence. It has been almost a month now, and no one is taking credit for their sudden “resurrection” (as the newspapers put it).  How are they here? Why are they here?

By the time we get all the DNA samples sequenced from around the country we have built a formal consortium of researchers, we all see the data as it arrives in our shared cloudspace. It creates more questions than it answers; at first the new genomes are different enough from our historical genomes that we say “aha! These must not actually be Carolina Parakeets!” as if we have any other reasonable hypothesis for what these birds “are,” as if species are a real thing you can “be” and not an over-simplification of variation in genomic and phenotypic data (a useful tool for scientists but not a discrete biological reality). Then some quick-thinking colleagues model expected genomic changes over time, wondering what the historical genome would look like if the populations had undergone over a hundred years of random mutations, local selection, and genetic drift. Their models estimated that if the historical parakeets had survived to the modern day, their genome could look… a hell of a lot like the genome of the current birds. It is as if the parakeets had never disappeared, like they had been here all along, adapting to human presence and thriving on the landscape. Except they hadn’t, they notoriously hadn’t. They had been gone, so very gone. They were dusty memories behind fingerprint-cover glass, old paintings commemorated in nerdy tattoos, textbook warnings of the dangers animals faced when humans were left to exploit the landscape. Yet here they are, delighting crowds, living comfortably among humans as if they had been here all along.

I have to admit it scares me. Not the parakeets themselves, they are delightful to watch. I feed them in my yard, see them on my way to work, I hold them when I stop by colleagues’ study sites, I even process the occasional car fatality (although way fewer than you would expect for a species that had first seen a car a few months ago). I guess the mystery of it scares me. My parents love to regale people with stories from my childhood, how kid-me would burst into tears when I heard the word “mystery” because the idea of the unexplainable haunted me more than monsters or ghosts. There’s no doubt in my mind that the impulse to explain the world led me to science, to explore bird populations over space and time, from communities of species interacting on a landscape to the interactions between the individual cells within their bodies. I can’t say I’m not religious, but the mysteries of religion were always so separate from the mysteries of birds on the landscape. One was something to ponder in wonder and be content to never understand, the other was something to ponder in wonder then beg for funding to test hypotheses that would lead me closer to understanding. But what was there to test here, really? We’ve been combing the records for months now; the first confirmed sighting was the “What’s this bird?” photo from Louisiana, followed by hundreds more across the country in the following days, and thousands every day since. It’s like a thriving population of birds, long invisible to our eyes, were suddenly rendered visible again. What does it mean to be a professional Ornithologist when you cannot even begin to formulate a reasonable hypothesis for the biggest bird-related scientific question in living memory (if not ever)? The existential crisis eats at me, perhaps more so than for my other colleagues. Many of them are in a much healthier space than I am, content to enjoy the delightful new wonders and to leverage the public enthusiasm into long-term conservation and education projects (the app Parakeet Tracker has become so popular it’s inspired thousands to try eBird and iNaturalist now too).

The museum has an entire section of parakeet merchandise now. I think Cincinnati is especially delighted that they are no longer the site of the death of the last Carolina Parakeet; while ecotourism has increased across the entire eastern United States it has especially increased here as people make pilgrimages to the Cincinnati Zoo. Now children crowd by the dusty parakeet specimen, wearing parakeet hats, their arms and faces covered in temporary parakeet tattoos. I wish I felt less numb about it; my joy feels more intellectual than complete, I guess.

The spontaneous de-extinction of the Carolina Parakeet has predictably fueled more interest in the de-extinction of other species; since nothing else has yet appeared on the landscape as if by magic, companies have scrambled to monetize their efforts. Luckily my colleagues got ahead of it this time, doing an amazing outreach campaign to show public audiences how these parakeets differ from previous “de-extinction” efforts. The playful gregarious birds really highlight how much of their distinct phenotype is learned social behaviors, very hard to manufacture in a lab without intergenerational interactions.

The best news, of course, is the hope that it gave people again. We knew that constant discussion of the dire threats facing the environment in the Anthropocene risked a sort of doomerism that dampened public enthusiasm for conservation work; ask any ecologist or conservationists how they are doing and you’ll readily see that they’ve spend their careers “living alone in a world of ecological wounds unnoticed by the average person” (to paraphrase Aldo Leopold). But I guess it was hard to imagine alternative scenarios, yet these parakeets have awakened a hopeful enthusiasm for conservation work that I never dreamed possible. I see them now on recycling bins, on press releases for new conservation-related laws and regulations, for eco-friendly lifestyle choices and technology, for corporate campaigns to protect wildlife. The parakeets may be oblivious to the impact they have had on us, but the entire world is not oblivious to the reappearance of these parakeets.

In the years since I have settled into our new reality as best I can. I still feel an unease when I see them occasionally, but my therapist has helped me learn to shut that down so I can instead bask in their presence and the good that has come from it. The recent interns at the museum were all children when the parakeets first reappeared, their lives have been shaped by the hope that came with the colorful birds. I don’t know if we will be able to save all the current species on the landscape, but I know that the future of conservation will be in good hands. And now, when tiny sticky hands land on the glass in front of the parakeet specimen, I know exactly what to say to the kiddo about Carolina Parakeets. The real science behind this completely made-up story (References):

“The last Carolina Parakeet” from the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, accessed 13 April 2025. Link: https://johnjames.audubon.org/last-carolina-parakeet

“Reviving the cold case of the Carolina parakeet extinction” by Tammana Begum for The Natural History Museum at Tring, published 27 July 2021, accessed 13 April 2025. Link: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2021/july/reviving-the-cold-case-of-the-carolina-parakeet-extinction.html

Wikipedia article for the Carolina Parakeet, accessed 13 April 2025. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_parakeet#

Wikipedia article for Incas (the last Carolina Parakeet), accessed 13 April 2025. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incas_(parakeet)

Burgio, K.R., C.J. Carlson, A.L. Bond, M.A. Rubega, and M.W. Tingley. 2022. “The two extinctions of the Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis.” Bird Conservation International 32: 498-505. DOI: 10.1017/S0959270921000241. Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bird-conservation-international/article/abs/two-extinctions-of-the-carolina-parakeet-conuropsis-carolinensis/402E120779F8760E4A95B82E0181805B Image credit: Huub Veldhuijzen van Zanten/Naturalis Biodiversity Center, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Naturalis_Biodiversity_Center_-_ZMA.AVES.3159_-_Conuropsis_carolinensis_Linnaeus,_1758_-_Psittacidae_-_skin_specimen.jpeg