BY BRYAN STEVENS| SPECIAL TO THE
BRISTOL HERALD
Feb 18, 2018
Early American naturalist and
artist John James Audubon painted these Carolina parakeets feeding on
cockleburs. Less than a few decades after Audubon painted this work, the parakeets
were already in a decline that would result in their extinction.
A century ago this week, a caged
bird died in Cincinnati, Ohio. However, this was not simply a case of an
untimely death of a beloved family pet. Instead, that bird represented the last
of its kind.
The bird belonged to the
Psittacidae, a family of tropical birds that includes macaws, parrots, caiques,
amazons and parrotlets. The bird, a male named Incas, was the last captive
Carolina parakeet (the only species of parrot native to the eastern United
States) in existence when he died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Feb. 21, 1918, in
the same aviary where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had died four years
earlier.
The demise of Incas came about a
year after the death of his mate, who had been named Lady Jane by their
zookeepers. In a time before the forces of social media and round-the-clock
mass media, the death of Incas likely went unnoticed by other than a few
people.
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