Mitred parakeet | Psittacara mitratus

Voice

A heavy, rasping kraah or kra-kra-kraah, lower and broader than the call of the Red-masked Parakeet, in short runs and almost always in flight. The tone is coarse and slightly nasal, with a grating undercurrent that carries the length of a city block. A flock moving between roosts makes a dull, rolling noise with no rhythm to it. In a fruiting tree the birds are silent and give themselves away only by falling peel and stones.

Identification

Big, heavily built green parakeet with a long, sharply tapering tail and a thick horn-white bill; at 219 to 275 grams it is nearly half as heavy again as the Red-masked Parakeet. The forehead carries a broad, slightly brownish red band that turns bright red on the forecrown, with further red on the lores and immediately in front of the eye. Behind that the head is green, with loose red feathers scattered irregularly over crown, cheek, ear coverts and side of neck — not a closed mask but a flecked look, different on every bird. The bend of the wing is green, at most with a single red feather, and the underwing lacks red entirely. A broad, bare, cream-white ring surrounds the eye; the iris is yellow-orange. Juveniles show almost no red and cannot be named at all.

Confusion species

The Red-masked Parakeet is the mirror image and the only real confusion species: slightly smaller and markedly lighter, with the red gathered into a closed mask over forehead, lores, eye surround and cheek, a sharp red patch at the bend of the wing, and red lesser underwing coverts that flare as the bird takes off. If a green parakeet goes up and shows no red on the underside of the wing, you are looking at a Mitred. The Rose-ringed Parakeet is far slimmer, with a longer, thinner tail, a red bill and no red on the head. Even so, naming escaped parakeets in the field often stays uncertain: the amount of red increases with age, young birds are near featureless, and the Spanish colonies hold intermediate birds carrying marks of both species — the same has been reported from the Californian colonies.

Habitat

In Spain a bird of city parks with tall old timber, of avenue plantings and of the gardens of villa quarters on the hills above town. Nests in cavities: gnawed-out holes in thick trunks and in palms, and crevices in walls and under the eaves of tall buildings. Feeds in the crowns on buds, blossom, seed and fruit, with a liking for the seed pods of Judas tree and false acacia and for figs. Gathers towards evening in a fixed group of roost trees, usually in the same park it breeds in.

Range and movements

In Europe established only in Spain, the best-known groups being in Barcelona — among others in the Parc de Monterols and around the Parc de la Ciutadella — with single birds elsewhere along the Mediterranean coast. The numbers are small and are not systematically counted. Outside Europe the species is feral in southern California, Florida, Hawaii and Uruguay. The native range runs from the departments of Ayacucho and Cuzco in southern Peru through Bolivia into north-west Argentina, in dry montane woodland and wooded valleys between roughly 1,000 and 2,500 metres — a high, cool, sunny climate not unlike the Spanish interior.

• Resident
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

In Barcelona pick a park with tall old trees on the slope above the city and settle there for the last hours of the afternoon. Unlike the Monk Parakeet, which betrays itself by its stick nest, this species gives itself away only by voice and by the coming and going at a tree cavity. Look at the head as soon as a bird sits still: loose red feathers on an otherwise green crown mean this one; a closed red mask means it is not. A bird seen only in flight is best left unnamed.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern), with a large Andean range and a population held to be stable, although the species was trapped heavily for the cage-bird trade for decades. In Europe it is an introduction founded on cage birds that escaped or were released; with import and trade tightly restricted, hardly any new birds are added. The Spanish groups are small and grow slowly, and no study shows harm to native birds — as a cavity nester it could in principle compete with native hole-nesters, but at these numbers that remains theory. It is not on the Spanish Catálogo de especies exóticas invasoras, which does list the Monk and Rose-ringed Parakeets; there is therefore no national control programme, and management amounts to whatever councils do while pruning.